for Dann & bindlestiff cyberpunk
I am telling a story without prehistory.

Pocket rockets of pink, the go to temple

of gum blossom. Rays of morning sun

settling on the driver’s side. By way of warning,

I would say I am impressionable.

My inability to assume greater agency

offset by being ‘on board’

with the attention economy. Pieces of intelligence

fall as spring rain,  once more unadvertised.

Breathing in damp grass simply

the work of motor neurones. Be still,

      be mine, my Dixie flatline.

Road trip vs the more anti-natural commute:

is this shorthand outworn for the human path?

Paddocks disguise a different kind of sprawl, post

the muteness of winter. A Euclidean delisting.

Might I take a wrong turn

at the object of temptation? Mud-spatter

on the high chrome gloss. The tattoo of razor girl

making out with the console cowboy

just visible through the rearview mirror.

If I took a peptide for every disappointment,

would I fail to replicate Love’s focalisation?

The foreign object unlodged, made mobile

in my basic needs bloodstream. How to drive

beyond an escape clause of origins,

of having started out all wrong, a problem

to be ‘found’ somewhere, hand in glove,

with my infantile life. Outsider bespoke:

That was then, this is now. 

                                 Listening to bird song. Again.