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Baffler Archives: Poems

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Vision
The actual “capture” presents no problem. Electron guns cover the rows of pixels at 25 sweeps per second, refreshing and changing intensities. 28 gray values make feature extraction the challenge. Efficient decision trees collapse in the combinatorial ...

Memory
People are walking back and forth on the city streets buying food, newspapers, attending to business Their faces are flushed, their lips full and bright. You lifted the sheet to look at his face you bent to kiss him in the way you always did, but it was the last time. He looked ...

from Absolute Solitude
For God’s sake, don’t touch me. The hands of a leper might fill you with fear, but these hands of mine will fill you with dread. They are cold and meek and moist and for a reason I myself fail to understand they have the vicious apathy of a corpse.   Translated ...

Ulysses XXI
I advanced into the crowd, no one knew my name— if had they known, would it have mattered: did I know myself? And wheeling around, I was molded into a shape by the shadowy light, as if this mob, swelling and indifferent, were a sea-breeze off of which something good might blow ...

Hard Objects
November 03, 2015
1. Blades   A blade sticks in a pane of glass. One blade. Bars the door. In its shadow another owl soars.   A blade’s voice is a woman leaping out of water   The sky has deep wounds Blades drop through the holes   Hanging gardens. Leaves of grass pared ...

The Lighthouses
November 03, 2015
The lighthouses lead the land into the sea to drown. When we throw cobblestones into the brain’s whirlpool we see it, far off, indiscernible between sand castles, a spectral shadow dropped from the night sky it blinks, sweeping over this decrepit century like the priest ...

No Knowing
“That a really accurate calculation or estimate may not exist, that the procedure is pure guess-work, or simply traditional and conventional, happens even to-day in every form of capitalistic enterprise where the circumstances do not demand strict ...

The Mantegna Oculus Rift
It’s crude to claim our technology moralizes that of the past: inside the a/c remains in fact the daughter of the emperor I have conquered blowing down my neck   and I am a man. When we reach the next level there are too many guns to be good: the avatar glows ever ...

From “Depths”
November 03, 2015
Swimming could be an extension of the desert palm trees exasperate her calm and stop life from moving on like the rider on the dog who said don’t compare me to the rider on the horse because I haven’t a sword or sheath, not in my belt and up till now I hadn’t ...

Tomb of the Unknown Celebrity
  You were sexy.I mean, you must have been. You must have stirreda noticeable need—neverin a majority of the audience, of us,but in a sizeable plurality. For real,as maybe people saidin those days. Whichever they were. For real andfor a while. It was a charming ...

Something
November 03, 2015
Drifting across the page that I’m writing on. Is it the drifting ghost of the cigarette smoke From back in the day when I smoked? Is it the voice, Unbodied, speaking to me, that “fantôme sans os”Ronsard rising up from the grave tells us he is?Is it ...