“MEMORY’S NEON, PART ONE”

In the window reflection
Of the passenger mirror

Bordering fields merge
In a casual guitar duet

Of distant neon plumage
Like a parrot atop its cage

A creature you
Can’t touch because

Realism is
Just breathless telling

Because infinity is the most believable thing
In the dip rise stem of road stem wires

Where a parish church spire
Pricks the gauzy plumes of superdiesel gods

Roll up the window of man
Roll on

Turn on the heat
Drawn from the night

Tune the radio
In search of tune

Find yourself
In a new circumference

Sunday bells
Of hearsay battlespace

Foreign tongues reporting bone facts
Amid nerve-centres of disaffection

Look outside at
Nature’s entrails

The equine form
Is Platonic

Coarse signature
Of horseshit

Look around
The turning world

In its slow
Cyclical plot

Behind
Hecate’s wheel

Roll up the window
So the outside moans

Like a spaceship
In a wormhole

So the tires
Turn into wings

There’s a hockey team
About it

Icarus in Motor City
Crumbling public art

Divers urban farms
A Robocop statue

Fragments—figments—mental residue
Overlaying a field filled with a hundred deer

Feeding on unreaped corn
White scuts like eyeless faces

Muzzles
In the snow

Ears
Pricked

All of this stored
And hidden as the hidden moon as

Scrambled voices shuck off their aether,
Are legible, fall silent, a song:

One of Chopin’s Nocturnes
At midnight, reception choppy

Through torchlit crossroads with
Tampered-with signage

Through shimmery air
In oncoming headlights

Through pentatonic eyes
Of Teutonic winter

Through wet grisly
Outdoor passageways

Through grim
Septic butchery

Where the light
Don’t shine

And where it don’t shine
You don’t see

Thousands of deer
Are run down each year

Cut through another
Arcing line

— Dustin Cole is the author of the novel Notice (Nightwood Editions) and the poetry chapbook Dream Peripheries (General Delivery). He has also contributed writing to APOCALYPSE CONFIDENTIAL, Maximus Magazine, Safety Propaganda, BC BookWorld, Heavy Feather Review and the British Columbia Review.

Posted in