Thomas Renjilian
1.
In some projected future
we're together and refreshing
the browser once tickets go
on sale for the Amy Winehouse
Hologram Tour. You grew up
to be a singer, but a bad one, can't
get booked or even show up
on time for the grimy open mic
I am still alive and available
you shout to me, and yet
the venues are filled with fetishists
of death, and yet, you're not
alive and yet, you and I, hologram,
we'll buy the tickets, we'll go.
2.
You never asked to be bright
as memory as holiday as
broken gin bottles street lit
and pricking our shoes remember
in Brooklyn in line for the show
we watched a man get stabbed
by a woman and walked
away because that's what bodies
are for to break in the street
and bleed for a while and heal
or die deserved or not please
don't take my photo now
I said red pustules bursting
young a skin tearing apart
to regrow a skin don't let me
calcify in light like this
I am still alive or never
was and even if I weren't
even if you aren't, please
3.
Wet on the deck of the above
ground pool, clouds moving in,
I watched my friend's dog die—
It jumped from, it hung from—
years before my friend died, too,
driving home too fast, a pole:
It didn't fall. No block lost
power—any mourner watching
holograms that night did so
without interruption: I am still
alive the shivering glow might cry
still daughter, still mother, but this
was years ago. We didn't have
holograms yet. What we had:
4.
A poet goes to hell so he can
find a lover. Necrophiliac
with a shovel hums whatever
songs he remembers while
his dirt pile grows so high
he's buried to the throat can't
breathe. In the cafeteria we rapped
the Insane Clown Posse song
"Cemetery Girl" which was a take
I guess, on the Orpheus myth,
translated into words like rusty, musty
(regarding the body of the woman).
Shouldn't we admit this desire
isn't the desire to save? Nothing collected
was ever preserved. The body is
a difficult thing. Be surface be depth
be the pool I watch you ripple in.
5.
The friend is a phantom though
the limbs are real: grave
robbers at least you puzzle
a body from decay, get hands
dirty. We lift our hands
above our heads to take
the photo, curious at the show
if light can capture light
what is science, my friend once
asked our teacher. He said pinion
means both the feather and the act
of cutting the feather to ground
the bird. Theorists once believed
Lana Del Ray was a hologram too.
Someone was real someone broke
the glass someone flew through.
6.
I rode in the car you died in.
No I didn't. We listened
to Rehab and Back to Black
and you sang off key covers.
No you didn't. Are you mad?
Are you mad I made this girl up
so in the poem it's not you
who dies and becomes hologram?
No you aren't. It’s not a question
but something more broken
when I ask: Will you wear the body
I remember for you?
7.
Don't. Be stolen cigarette smoke
behind the 7/11 be inevitable
withdrawal be nets of skin shed
by roadside snake be deleted
online journal be a song
before it's sung be Tanqueray
be trouble be the rotten rotting
one be dying flame melting wax
be nothing healthy nothing
sick nothing self-inflicted be
the pause between the irregular
beat be appearances canceled
be as long as it takes be reasons
withheld be no no no.