Jasper Bernes

From We Are Nothing and So Can You

And then went downtown

Disguised as minor characters

Who find no end of objects

Turning space to price.

They have named something after you,

Another gaunt outlet chainsawed through solid

Paraphrase, the blunt force of not trying to hear

Scattered in lines and arcs like labor time

Evaporating in a riot.

I step out of the hotel and into the last of all possible worlds.

What reason could I possibly give?

When the lights turned back on, every inch of the city

Tagged up with equations:

 If G – N > T, then hulk, smash;

Otherwise, night night, kids.

As if again assigned to the burning system of piecework

Let out to the black mass of just-in-time execution

While you navigate the transcendental loop

Athwart overturning a cop car as “art”

And doing it where the bad neighborhood of “real life”

Abuts the state. Like everything that shits on you

A question of timing.

That’s what the state is, in the end—

An appointment book with a gun,

The days stamped onto the metropolitan

Superfice, an entire choreography of dates whose purpose is to schedule

Other dates when one’s confinement to a point in space

Cut deep into time

Will be decided.

You lost your way in the teargas one night.

Out of the burning places and back into the catacombs

Of endless work and talk, the ranked textures colliding with the force

Field emitted from the traffic lights

To produce notions of value and utility.

No wonder you just say fuck it and do something really sketchy

Or go to graduate school or get into building bikes.

As again the vats fill up with blood, with our blood

And again the amphibious thing

Crawls out of the Victorian prose

And gets all up in our face:

A mass of bloodied paperwork

Become a viscous pulp, from which limbs

Emerge, then trunks, then heads, then: the police,

Army and postal service all in one.

It’s not not believing that maims

But believing in not believing

As if it were a dim anchor

Extruded from the neutral hiding places

As if you didn’t just live here. 

Jasper Bernes is the author of Starsdown (In Girum, 2007) and We Are Nothing and So Can You (Tenured Ninja, 2012). He is a postdoctoral fellow in the Literature Department at Duke University.