Broadband Creationism

Your aunt’s router is acting up.
She’s hitting it with a Bible
again.

 
Benjamin Kyle Poem

It’s not about how you look in the mirror, it’s about how you look
when you’re dancing on a floor of mirrors. Sometimes I look down
and can’t see my face. It feels a little strange when I think about it,
when I wonder if I’m missing any other body parts too, maybe a rib
or a kidney they removed in my sleep. Who are they you ask.
I don’t know. All I know is that I woke up with a thousand cross-hatches
spread over my skin and it came from somewhere up high, so high
that the light fossilizes. I contacted the Sheriff’s Department and they told me
not to worry, that most people wake 3-5 times in their life
covered in cross-hatches. I could hear the Sherriff taking a huge bite
of his Western Bacon Cheeseburger. I could hear all that sauce smacking,
and when I heard the entire onion slip from the fried ring, falling
onto the wax paper, he whispered Fuck this shit, and I asked him what he meant.
All he said was I have to go and put me on hold. Now all I am sure of
is Whitney Houston in my ear.

 
“Peter Haffeldore Survives Plunge off Golden Gate Bridge"

Did I tell you I went to elementary school with him?

He ate spiders at recess.

One day, the kid who always wore a trench coat
said that Peter didn’t actually eat the spiders,
just tossed them behind his back.

The kid who wore the trench coat
ate wood chips.

 
excerpt from Elevated Ditch

If I smell like cedar, please do not tell me, for rain will never make
wood mold then decay, and that is my goal on this day circled by smog. That smell, oh,
it’s just this new soap I purchased at Whole Foods for $12.99. There is no deliverance
in an overpriced fragrance. I remember walking through the streets and asking Mother
how long it’d take for all the rain to dry from the sidewalks
and Father telling me Pull up your pants, Huckleberry. O to be a barrel
floating along a flooded river. There is a spirit which flows
through the Sacramento Valley. The river is drying up and winter
is over. There is no rain yet to come. All I see entering the river
is drainage, those bubbles glimmering sudsy. Full of hope I am nothing. Full of shit
I am nothing, if not a ladybug in an ant farm. Dig further, dig harder and the dirt
will become mud. I will build a box of it. There is no kiln large enough
to bake this life-size Nancy Grace statue but I will throw it into the blue fires
of the creature’s head. Brown or green, the color of a lizard monster
makes no difference to me. All I am concerned with is the tide pulling
me into the current of this terrifying brain. Pulling, pushing—I am ambivalent
to the suction of strange ideas, but not to theories of alien bases
on the moon. When all is said and done all will be said and done. There is nothing
clever enough to make me forget I am alive, to forget the flashes
in the attic, the needles poked into my kidneys.