I should apologize for another

Poem about death     and political economy

But the daily walk is the graveyard

Emily, treading, treading

Like the Fang people of Africa with the

Bundled sticks of their dead dried

Folded and packed around on their backs

Thin children that never wake or complain
*
I open a file called “no file”

A messianic cloud of media

Rising above rioting squares

The colony called “don’t stop”

Does not stop—flails against futurity
It could yet be about corruption

It could yet be about better worlds

It stops just outside of town, rumbling

The largest truck you’ve ever seen

It’s bucket filled with half the earth. Literally. 
*
The other night I read a novel

In the file called “no file” I lodge

Records of evacuations, abandonments,

Foreclosures and dispossessions 
According to the avant-garde

This isn’t new

And “new” means “maybe we can

sell you another one of these.” 
I am upbeat despite the end-times

Faux comforts and police horizons
*
My daughters are shopping at the mall

It’s a green space we call “eternity”

All their lives are an imaginary

Of the yet-to-come
Even the mall is still only a dry unceded field

Mice wander and developers eye

With hungry imaginations crooning
You’re so fucking spatial

I wish I was spatial
*
Note to self:

Perimeters are difficult to discern

And species are in constant motion

Curling towards their disappearance

Engines culling “data” we will not read
I find it difficult

To imagine the lives of many others

Though their abandoned velour couches

Can be found in the forest

Soggy Blue Star Dust, Dr. Pepper
*
Mostly we keep blowing

Each other up

Like bombs are our way of saying
S’up, I’m here too

Is this crazy human meat times or what?

Now let’s keep making money, death mill daddy-O
*
My daughters cannot decide:

Zombie movie or cell phones?

I could still be dreaming

Of France and revolutions

Or walking between the etched stones
*
I tell the girls what matters

Is the soft light just back

Of the collective’s desiring eye

The beach we build beneath

The mall’s unmade paving stones

(though I do not mention

the continuous rule of dead

labour over living

or their future riveting

to a single fraction of time)
We choose the Zombie movie

Because life is like that
*
Emily, shall we hide our brave face

On this daily walk

Or take us simultaneous

As complicit beings wondering

How to stop, but carry on differently—

All we’re freighted with—

Unearned privilege, debt, colonies,

Muttering doges, sputtering lanterns,

The metallic insides of the earth,

The proximity of death squads—

And still slink silently

Towards better worlds?
*
Of course complicity just means

You have to change yourself entire

When changing the tired world
Its Molotov banquets,

Its endless lines of tanks idling nearby

Its schools for unlearning indigeneity
*
As if all we had to do was

Make the world strange again, hmm?

What is the nearness

Of economies and lobotomies?

Note how money is

The cryogenic liquid

Of this period evaporating

What lasts

And filling the tanks of

Sulphurous lies—
Just don’t look up at the eyedroppers

Poised above our frozen faces

As we gaze at the empyrean

Of stained acoustic ceiling tiles
*
Meanwhile beneath the glassy surfaces

Of our smartphones—deep in pocket—

Young girls and boys

My daughters’ ages and younger

Pull handfuls of dusky coltan

From a muddy trench in the Congo

And somewhere some kid—god love him—

Says it’s all good

Just before his brains become

Some zombie’s next meal