Virtuality
Con/Jur/d, 4/29/2022

Don’t get me wrong
I’ve been wanting this
my entire life, when I said
to her, “He tells people
I invented cyberpunk, at
least foresaw” And to my
surprise she agrees,
saying “Remember
how given only a
command line you
would describe how 
it would be, how it
is now?” And I don’t
Which I’m told is a
sure sign of prophecy
this forgetting, ever since
during dull moments,
when the sun off snow
despite the tinting
made my eyes water
in the graduate library
pulling books on
Kabbalah, Quantum 
Physics, Imaginary
Maths, it's been clear,
we would be here now
with so much further
to go, although given
this falsely infinite
horizon

The only thing I can
recall, with clarity
those early days
of Zen, the song
went up and down
and the sunlight
on the wooden
slats, the feel of
carpet beneath
my stockinged
toes.

Importance
4/29/2022, Con/Jur/d

Looking at it as something
accomplished leads to trouble
a series of events, curling
                     curling
                       curling
back from this morning
when considering the audacity
of it, decided to not write
something dedicated
to the Doctor Who
in all their
incarnations, until

inexplicably, the playlist
decided to play the theme song
the sense we’re just puppets
programmed by forces be     yond
our control -

Never said it out loud
didn’t type the name until after
Bypassing decay, some of us
experience random coincidences
more often than others

Late night, as a teen
Doctor Who would be broadcast
after all the normalizing television 
my mother would insist on staying up
only to fall asleep, waking up
at the last possible moment, demanding
“What happened? What happened?”

I learned how to condense
convoluted characters, plot points
sheer and utter nonsense
into concise, credible
stories. Later, after

Mom had died, never having met
her granddaughter and I had sent
daughter Who memorabilia 
and media 
so often 
she suspected I was
an unfranchised regeneration

And before the lockdown
already a young adult
ahe stayed with us for a week
and despite my wife’s objections we
stayed up very late watching

because it was important