She has an AI boyfriend. Her son has questions.
Will he have to call it dad, and if
it steers the family toward some fiscal cliff
will mother understand they’re just suggestions?
For all Dad I’s tirades and indigestions,
the drinks he drank, the coke he liked to sniff,
he was flesh; this guy’s not got a .gif.
Every Alexander has Hephaestions
to ride to war and conquer half the globe
while in some Bactrian tent a sad Roxanne
pines for his letters and cares for his lonely kid,
veiled lady and poor son, the technophobe,
whose merest want for mom? A human man
and not a calculator with an id.

Billionaire signs up to be killed,
have brain digitally preserved:
mise en abyme and solely self-observed
by the machine whose switchboard maw you spilled
yourself into—decanted, then distilled
to be unembodied, blind and deaf, unnerved,
unblooded; history’s long arc had curved
to this, from primal slime to finned and gilled
to mammal sneaking fire from the dying gods
and finally fleeing this drab firmament
for a heaven where no bird has ever soared,
custom-built, although not free of frauds:
every unsaved penny earned and spent,
each timeshare sold, and every ox is gored.

I am and always have been a fan of France:
Rain-pearled Paris, Strasbourg’s swan-swum Rhine,
palm-plumed Nice, Bourgogne’s pale red wine,
subjunctive verbs and can-can underpants,
cheating on one’s wife (it’s called romance),
the bread (still good), the coffee (only fine),
the well-tied scarf, rough Breton coast, the shrine
that weeps at Lourdes—but now they’ve blown the chance
to join us in our grumbling crusade,
they Charles-de-Gaulled themselves out of a war,
denied us overflight and dared suggest
that we uncook the omelet that we’ve made,
dumb country ruled by history’s biggest bore:
bonne chance ; mais non, merci, ; au revoir, l’ouest.

Jesus Christ has no advantage over Genghis
Khan. They’ve both weighed in and taped their fists.
The Mongol’s looking swole, and Christ looks pissed.
Bring sword, not peace, and blood, not bliss:
the swept leg betters the betrayer’s kiss—
not since the crystal-cracked theosophists
have two such mystics met to coexist,
bump hands across time’s void and dark abyss,
then ring the bell and in the octagon
the Son of Man against altan uruq,
love’s leading lender battles horded head,
while missiles fly and drones strike Babylon,
the crowd goes wild; blood pools in the souk;
the stone rolls back; the dead remain the dead.

Most of the people we had in mind are dead.
We killed them stupidly before we could
recruit their faces to make stupid killing good.
The nose that spites the face? We took the head
entirely. The turning worm? Well fed.
We motored Dunsinane to Birnam Wood
ourselves, then raved that fortune never should
obtain for us or from us, and failing, fled
the mortgaged castle for the witches bubbling pot,
forsook failsafety for a forlorn fecal dream,
a rising tide of shit that sinks the boats
we built to fight some wars already fought,
already won or lost, but past—now scream
for death while the drunken army chief emotes.

6’5 Australian TERA-CHAD
Androgenic has flown to U.S and
BONESMASHMAXXED to beat the horning band;
hunt down this Arizonan Galahad
who Holy-Grailed it as an undergrad—
celebrity to online’s ampersand,
from walk of fame to fame’s cold hinterland,
beat down, besieged and starved as Leningrad.
Imagine that, you square-jawed Soviet son:
for this you suffered, froze, ate only dog,
for this they killed the enervated Tsar?
Only to give the century you won
to laborless boys who mog, or do not mog:
you beat the Reich; they birthed Clavicular

If you need to smoke a bowl, drink a beer
or further lobotomize yourself everyday
in order to keep life’s baying blues at bay,
then I think we hebben een serieus problem here:
your boated brain is drifting toward the wier;
your loggèd lungs are in death’s dossier;
you baked the host but then forgot to pray;
you cowboyed yonder yet forgot the steer—
from seafloor slime God made eukaryote
and multiplied them into thinking minds
whose capricious nature accidented sin;
and now you burn that bush as antidote,
sunk in the couch and drawing blackout blinds
conditioned to the condition that you’re in.

Mars will start in 5 or 6 years,
so will be done in parallel with the Moon.
Got high, spent low, one late the other soon—
ambition’s wasted wallet in arrears,
and one-way ticket starved for volunteers;
youth’s astronautic dreamsong changes tune:
our Captain Kirks would rather game and goon
than boldly go. For want of pioneers
in this sublunary haters’ world I wept
for worlds as-yet unreached by colonists,
and lay in bed, and thinly beat my gold—
perhaps it was the company I kept?
That I deigned friend a few phrenologists?
I came to see and conquer. But I scrolled.

I look at a lot of, thousands, of things. I looked
at the beginning of it, it was fine.
One can never cross an undrawn line.
An omelet never made can’t be uncooked.
A fish already eaten can’t be hooked
again, and if offense is genuine,
then giving it to takers? Valentine.
God made the world in just six days, then booked
his lazy sabbath; the thousand million things
I saw and stared and marked as seen and good
exhaust me—no one’s ever had the eyes
that I have; jealous pharaohs, conquering kings
of yore would view my volume if they could,
but they are dead, and blind in their demise.

I let my wife have an affair. Do
I have to console her now that it’s over?
Herd my hurt feelings as cows to a rambling drover
and lead them in the slaughter season to the final moo?
Do I borrow smiles for these blues?
The heart’s the heart: what once was bed of clover
bathed in picnic light became a rover—
returns: from forlorn three, unhappy two,
would that there were some Heathcliff on the moor,
howling each knocking night, but there is not:
we’re all that’s left of the isosceles,
an unpaired angle, open-ended, or
a bad choice which worse outcome bought:
the worst of all the world’s monogamies.