Blue Shift: A collection of short poems and sundries.

by Jenna Inouye

Beneath sunlit metal trees
beneath a concrete earth
under the working shadows, and migrant, thoughtless paths
engineered, molded, vital and bleeding
biological, self-sufficient genesis machinery.

And fall,
fall to knees,
fall to knees and burrow deep.

Trapped in the rhythm of an ancient song never played
spindle-stick and starved, endlessly loitering into panicked solipsism
their sun-swollen notes flickering illness to the faded tapestry of aged minds.
Upon a mottled felt earth with crayon-colored fabricate seeds
all sedentary, all insensible: half baked, full throttle.

And a warm,
a warm glowing,
a warm glowing sickness.

Lace-clothed dolls in shambling caskets, eclectic and homeless
with weary eyes and visionless minds, painted alert to wake
electric tombs, bright light wombs: where senselessness eats at decay
forever seeking the multi-million, orb-filled immortal halogen protozoa
and baring thin-veneered teeth at the walls of the perforate paper mansions.

But I,
I am alive,
I am alive in here.

Living to work, living to die, living to release their spores; gene-spliced and altered
polluted by memetic autonomy, the cloying siren of the universal chaotic zeitgeist
those to transplant into the pale stuttering white-noise of tandem hesitance
unto the pandemic madness, and millions straitjacketed into a shared lucid nightmare
and to be afraid of the dark in the dark.

Of the warm,
warm glowing,
warm glowing sickness.

See us fleshy things in cotton-buffed milk-soaked childhood skins
silk cord sinew and wet meat rising from a burning earth on ashen wings
endlessly lost to self-replicating, contagious, diamond-etched neural paths,
the titanium roots of expansion, devaluation and endless abstraction
who remain still listless to the infinite calculations of the quantum divide.

But you,
you are beautiful,
you are beautiful math.

52 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 23, 2014