E r i c T y l e r B e n i c k —

Stupefaction at a Distance

The world was made, just this once,

for eternity, and you can tell

it’s starting to regret being so old.

Through the garden, past the jonquils

there lives a digital city

full of animus and smooth, wet nudity.

I have to be tied up when I’m too vexed

and tickled with a cormorant quill

until the grey tide recedes from my vision.

There are whole dimensions we’ll never see

simply because our eyes don’t bend that way.

The struggle for beauty has been a disaster,

one pedantic miss after another,

and now all of the magic in my body

has to be choked out like a fox

from its safe and barren den.

Through the digital city, past the firewall

there grows a garden, full of jonquils

and nude, bathing animals.

Every year, the bright red ABORT button

grows in circumference

as does the anthropic impulse

to push it.

I assure you, my survival

has been an accident,

neither egregious nor charitable,

but perplexing how all of my knives

turn instantly to foam.

I’ve dressed all of my compulsions

in corduroy, so I’ll always know

how near they are, and how fast

they are approaching.

Halfway between the city

and the garden, I swim

on my back, nude

as a jonquil and as forgetful.

Ego Ex Machina

I find myself, once again,

confined to the borders

of a goose’s black tongue.

When it waddles, I waddle,

and in unison, we waddle

as our fear leaves us in white

eruptions and a bloomy path

emerges from the old one.

I have made no new friends this year

and something tells me it’s my fault

as the pretty face in front of me chatters

on about a song I’ll never hear on purpose.

I can never get my pronouns right,

always saying I when I mean its negation.

In the center of a glittering city, I am stunned

by a thought so opposite of death it feels like dying.

Lately, things have been looking just

as I anticipated, and so I don’t fear

as much for my sanity, but for the sanity

of those for whom this horror was unimaginable.

There are only small moments left.

A boy on a bike is still a beautiful sight,

and water, as long as I’ve known it, has been wet,

and way out in a pasture I’ll never see but know to be real—

a zebra grazes.

.