Blessed Are the Rich

If the scriptures punched into me anything, it’s that the future
is a torso in a bag, hidden in prison

before summoned to be true. Space-sex, where has your winter gone?
Today we lust after younger gravities.

Sudden February in New York City too hot and royal blue.
Like a comet’s coma. Robot-blood.

And the collective cerebrum in tech plants a bramble
of code: cellular fruit to get there first—

one of the exoplanets, the news outlets say, must be awash in water:
H2O slapping its weeping waves around a cobalt. A hole diluting.

Wet. For what? Flagpole? A NASA emoji.
Signs of alien life are now more probable than ever.

There’s no geometry to language, but in America, alien
borders me and everyone and I love. Shoot-shoot.

Skirting my street, elm branches aglow
with plastic bags: wings. Dirt-bound. So faint a verve of dead light, dead meat.

Familiar footsteps ... the uninterpreted world
signals smoke in the distance: no, no. Fact that assaults us.

In coalition with our ape-skull, I want to be thankful.
Eggshell in space. Milk-toothy ache; small dwarf—

Trappist-1. The Ultra-cool, our astro-monk.
Solar Sister, so tell us—how to, how to

disassemble our fragile empire without ballooning
the glottal-bleat system for another.

The red moon in our mouth
wreaks havoc. That debt. The digits of home.