SAM WRIGHT FAIRBANKS

Called a Faggot

How many years of bleaching until I become Americana?
You don’t strike me as a crier, but we both were born in July.

Am I expected to believe you
had too much love?

The future’s come. It is not chrome
and does not shine.

Have some fucking reverence for deep time.
All the world can be staged

as a marked-up online showroom, and the shape
of the universe is no concern

since everything on earth became a top with nothing under.
I am called a faggot in the grass where I write this draft,

and I am. I say goodbye from the moment we meet
and the last sun sinks in the bottomless television.

I take your picture when I go but have none to give
and hear voices at the wrong time.

Life is a brief comparison with nothing,
and I fight it like a punishment.

I travel every living room in an evening, screaming
Aspirations are never the same as their taglines.

Now everyone’s on top of me at bedtime, screaming back
The harm has already happened so it’s okay for banks to be gay.

I will never sleep—a bloodshot diva never dreaming
through the west’s most flammable night,

stomping every solid wood credenza in the lower 48
to pulp and hoping for a spark.

Time Theft Is Best Practice

Note the finer textures of dystopia

Technologies of touching, plucking
files from screens or clouds from skies

with like effort, ingesting them
with comparable dispassion.
There's a search bar where my eyes close.

Is interstitial something we can be?
Are years a thing we can consume?
Could there be undoctorable proof
of the online marketplace for subjunct summers rolling jokes
and almost blowing damp-socked jocks against snack
hut cinder block; of the shared delusion of plastic houses,
ponds called lakes, mulch and pine cone beaches, sap-
stained boxer shorts, vestigial mills, dry sockets, bloody
breaths, sprigs in our nail beds; we fluky creatures
of discomfort sucking dew from boulders, fanning damaged
hair across the creek to lift an errant fleck of mica from
suspension or, when ritual or spasm caught us (a coin I
have termed dozen-meets-dime), when, neither content
nor content, the console could console us by some slippage
in depiction?

Do we carry ideology,

or does it fall on us, e.g., anvils?

In any event, the country’s now a corporation,

and time theft is best practice.

Sam Wright Fairbanks was born in a bog and raised on the internet. They write poetry in Brooklyn.