Niagara, and: Spy

Niagara

And then the husband, head bowed, eyes closed,a tourist pamphlet in his lap, says,

did you know the green color of the wateris the color of the falls coming to an end.

And the bride says, you do not look good, love,pale as an angel. Are you sleeping well,

eating well. Did you know, he says,sixty tons of salt and rock flour drain

each minute, a foot each year, and in a thousandlifetimes, there will be no falls at all.

And the bride takes the pamphlet from his handsand folds it tenderly as if it were a thing

she loved and worried over. Did you know,he says on the verge of sleep that never arrives,

the end of his sentence carried out to sea.And the rainbow comes and goes according

to the clouds. And when it comes, the petalsof the cameras open, as they did just now.

And somewhere in a stranger's photograph,the man turns to the woman and says, did you

know. And she says, no, dear, I did not.Or was it, yes, I did. Either way

her palm on his brow is a bridal veilof water. It cures the sleepless, that sound.

It is the angel in the downpour, the coinso old it passes faceless through our hands.

And with that, the couple vanishes.And a thousand tons of mist rises and falls.

Spy

The average citizen is the world's most efficient censor.edward bernays

Open the private sky of your screen,the black turned blue turned personalmidnight, and you see an empty room

where pictures hang by no pins on the wall,each a door to yet another roomwith links to take you everywhere you choose.

And as you follow, there in the margins,you might spot a flirt, a trifle, a possiblepurchase so specific to your nature

it says, I see you, the way a glass ballsees a phantom of the eye that reads it.Your browsing history makes you visible,

albeit transfigured into vacation landsand prize possessions, the spyware metaphysicsthat lights the threshold of a higher order.

Some days temptation bares the povertiesyou never knew were there and not quite thereuntil they cast you in the role of stranger,

a fugitive of sleep and thus its double,its slave, your face lit with beautiful objects.They call out, these items, like a body,

yours or someone's outlived years ago,that cannot feel the arrow where it taps.You are, after all, in the future now,

where cars keep turning into children, starletsinto soap, love into the love of thingsthat morph into others and therefore spirits.

They wear the faces you cannot place yetbut know as the office of public relationsknows how to change the light bulb of the heart.

A bit like changing partners in the dark,in the smoke-sweetened orgy of lost time.Some blindness is so pure it is not dark,

as dreams are not dreams, not loneliness,until they break apart, named and dying.Not that we are silent in our sleep.

Only that the word for sleep comes later,if at all, as joy comes to pleasure, shockto anger, horror to the final solution.

The ministers of information and heartbreak,they say something about the force of speechwe dare not speak, and so hear constantly

in the libidinal thump of music at the mall,or the cadence of the orator who spits outsome disgrace the crowd swallowed long ago.

Desires die as songs do and so continuesometimes without notice, when we are singing,when anthems flow into each other as cities

into cities, limos into smoke, terrorinto dream homes walled in peacocks and blossoms.The heart that guillotines a mind is still.

Open the cold window of your personalhistory and it is less personal, morea thing out there in the great machinery.

The sky was mechanical once with starsfixed on domes inside of domes. A lieand thus...