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 more colors
the more essences absorbed
till the diphthong grows unpronounceable.
The whole thing’s about mixing incommensurate scales.
When I tell you I’m working on measurement
remember universal means colonial,
please. Our only hope is being open to respect.
Mantegna painted his famous ceiling
oculus in Mantua in a bedroom
for people who are married, i.e.,
building on their difference.
So in my jpg of the oculus
I’m less into the Moor
or staring at a putto’s well-foreshortened
balls-and-peen and more
into imitating his neighborling
who bites a marble bow
and pierces the oculus rim.
I am thinking of the people who suffer
to make my electricity possible
not out of love, because it is crude
to fall in love with the fallen
emperor’s daughter, but because another
foreshortening is always possible to render another
space that dilates failure:
near the core of Mantegna’s oculus
a dark slit could actually hold an eye
and probably was for hanging something. I
don’t want to look it up. I love the dark navel
in the dark tear at the edge of a cloud,
fresh, I love the peacock watching it,
I love the dirty tape that crosses over it from old
conservators. When I play video games
my avatar is always a woman
and I never simulate our wars,
i.e., those of the United States: instead
on “the shattered world known as Outland” and in general
I prefer the aftermath of history
understood with fantastical consequence.
In many cities in Europe you have no choice
but even in the States I open
windows in the heat and work beside
birds, children, sirens, thunder.