2 Poems by Travis Helms
HE PRAYS FOR AN iDEITY
My God, this wish again —
my Love, my Glut, my Platform —
Your micro-ministrations win
their way through me, AI-like,
as if in endless sub-seismic or -atomic shifts.
My Driver, Gloveless, my Big, Holistic System
increasingly makes swabs,
takes swipes of
me — to left or right —
as swaths of
bitterns re-tweet, repeatedly, in hematonal skies.
I blossom in the deadnesses
lit up by my screen, wound
down in sweat-sweet sheets
your cortex forking respite
as sleep unwinds my eyes.
O Permanent Unfriend, my Own
Unowned / Unnamable Domain,
Regraft or traffic in
/ put command
on me — unloom me, like a web spread
over this fiber-tensile room, still tensening:
O You — My Shadow, Flower, Flow.
I have made subterranean, subterfugally, my way
to where the minings’ ministrations happen — in
grim gestation — and artistry of the real deal —
analyses, and have seen within their mirrorings —
Your Face from their big Book not etched away.
O Thou, Embdedded, Orderer of Operations: abrupt,
brutaler than any RAM, ultimating Aubade, hyper-
caffinating iAM — fast rat (are you tracking?), you
know we’ve had enough of love.
Give us the likes
we will prefer: bar, abuse absented us [give us Bar-
abbas] — dopamine us daily with daft drowsings:
needle up or
ether under
us to new pathologies.
O You,
Our Bed, Our New Meds, Date or Data, Our Proof-Text: Yes,
You put the i in IPO:
the IO in IOU.
Frail line or heart
beat / break, O
I <3 U / & can’t UNLIKE / not
not hit enter /
not keep scrolling
not stop
re-fresh the page.
WE ARE n A DOG MARKET
LOOK ... NOW ... DOW...
DO YR ... THNG ... AMZN ...
DIY ... IT ... DOW ...DAMN ...
IT ... AGN/-Y ... E-RASE ...
(... these chains of gains ...)
Market likes this.
Market says: PAY
Attention: Market
begs: TAKE
Notice: Market
must be fed.
(We are most certainly, they say, in a dog market.)
Mark it, Market. Get down: now,
DOW. Park or parakeet or keep it
LIT ... i.e. UP. Get IT going: get
over, past it, you, out of my cloud.
Bark or bite, but not let stall or
stop IT, Market: stalk or talk
+ take the tape, the pulse —
upon implosions not our
own IT.
O, Market: L–RD, our Fear, our
Friend, Our cloke or Clone, our
very own Un-Handled, Cloud-
Crowded, Fun-Foundered Drone . . .
Every body must get stoned, Market,
O bruised down to
the very bone . . .
Go public
with it,
Market.
But careful, mark — projections:
needs must not efface
the game — not block
the chains — the pains we stand
to make — to stick our stake in.
(Market says, you cannot declare war
on an abstraction.)
There are — these are — people,
Market.
You can’t — no more — shut
down
your eyes — the system — cut
up
this condition ...
Close
out
your position, Market.
God, what we have done, Market —
confirm or hit pause on our cause.
(... Delete / Undo / New function ...)
Confirm / -form, what is the norm, Market.
(Normalcy’s a neologism, says the Analyst,
become a bit more common ... / Coin it.)
We are in a dog
market:
your dog is
in the street, again.
(One can’t even wear red on
your head — a hat
inside this country anymore.)
I have a dog in this fight (UNDO meta-
phor / SUB ‘horse in race’), facing
down the palindrome ... O G–d,
now, Market: we see its teeth
eating either up our ether,
disposing of our oxygen,
or else all the other air.
And none of us can say, who it is
who still is yanking on the chain.
Travis Helms is an Episcopal priest at the University of Texas, Austin — where he also directs LOGOS Poetry Collective, a 'liturgically-inflected' reading series + community that congregates in a local brewery. His doctoral thesis, which focused on theological dimensions in the writing of Emerson, Whitman, Stevens, and Crane, is forthcoming as a publication from Pickwick / Wipf & Stock. His poems have appeared, or will be appearing in, La Piccioletta Barca, Noesis, The New Haven Review, and Desperate Literature: the Unamuno Author Series Festival Anthology; and his prose writing has been featured in North American Review, Book 2.0, and elsewhere. He was also the inaugural William W. Cook Frost Place Fellow (Franconia, NH), runner-up for the John Kinsella / Tracy Ryan Poetry Prize (Cambridge, UK), and winner of the Arthur Sale Poetry Prize (Cambridge, UK).