Andrew Joron

CONSTANTINOPLE II

Living in stems
Of artificial weather
    on that airless world

Market aires, fluorescent in

    code-membranous
Relay. Byzantine maze
    or avenue-of-ascent

Mapped as manuscript
As anxious alignment
    one gong-driven autumnal Letter

Sleeping with the god
Of reason. One dissected chord
    anatomy
That glows in galleon frame

Advanced identities
Compass-pincered

    atlas frozen at zero

Rumors of the sadness
Before time. Discursive loop

Scans carapace
Of the cricket — found where
Equator intersects the poles

Sominum route. The waters
Of which it is forbidden to speak

Flasks
Of the Covenant summon
Year Million's magus
    under a dark-spotted sun

Numeric
Of that endless [theorem
Corrupted in transmission]

    the vital organs, like
Edenic animals depart
    from dying body

The final city
Fire-bannered
 
 

MASKED DIALECTIC

Forced witness. That the face of witnessing become, finally, its own
slashed portrait.

The details vanish, not forgotten but subsumed. An everyday occurrence
raised on its hind legs, crazed by lightning.

Walls worn smooth by those who have passed here. The story of
civilization is screened nightly.

In proximity of a ribcage enclosing clockwork, the head fairly swims
with sentiment.

Further tragedies exist beyond motion. A glyph is also a coagulum,
drawing blackness from the white crevices of time.

Ceased continues, spectral within seized. The raw cords are replaced
by silvery trails of fluid.

Plotted against these coordinates, the noise of sunrise: a thought
empinnacled on hierarchy's ruin.
 
 

AUTOPLASTIK

The orbiting reflector
Turns night into day; petals ping

Accelerated workers
    swarm into the plaza
A blur on the soul's dead instrument

Everywhere, windows are blanked
To the same newsreel

I alone
Inhabit a mockup of the early nineteenth century

I, the great idealist
    who confesses
On the first page of his diary: Father!
There are no living atoms

& the diary answers: Identity
Is that
Which is eaten from within

Another man is partially assembled
On the table

Another module
Unshrouded, revolves in sunlight

    filtered through noise
A simulated victory

Crawls like a glove
Animated by music

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