Mustering

nobody expected
it
history
++++++++trumped up swirling dust
++++++++of staked vampires
strategies for coping

++++++++a bloviating Eurocentric trace
++++++++of what’s already happened

not just

unforgivable
++++++++what’s HR lean+++ focused
++++++++competitive and agile

on that grid
they made me
make my own
++++++++spreadeagle
++++++++on the rock
++++++++I’ve fossiled into

a defensible space
a safe room
++++++++installed by security

turned on by western art
dancing to a back beat
blasting
through ear buds
house music
a level 3 trauma unit

patched in
++++++++from envy
career
crass backend of contempt

but snap
what to do
with truth beauty twitter
++++++++always on

++++++++orange ball slowly sinking into the lake
++++++++a skytown raspberry
++++++++fast and bright
++++++++striated strobelit sky

anxiety coursing +++roiling
centered
two inches above the breast
surviving maimed

even licensed professionals can’t save us
when stupefaction’s engineered

++++++++arrange in chronological order
+++++Horatio Alger
+++++Sisyphus
+++++Road Runner

epistemic hauteur
the dainty epic
Prometheus pecked
avant la lettre bio-tech

++++++++epicurean

+++the Enlightenment
proletarian brutalism
+++the smokestacks of Verizon
+++in the crosshairs

sentence fusion a dangerous praxis

underling snigger
skills assessment
corporate-speak
for new ways to exclude you

++++++++Max’s Kansas City
++++++++owl of Minerva
++++++++avanti populi
all slightly before my time

what to do

requirements of representation
+++die hard
redundancy come full circle
now a good thing

++++++++free wi-fi
++++++++between Tarifa & Tangiers

a crowded middle brow paradise town

multiplying surplus work
fewer jobs
more accounting minutiae

longing to function
as a user
but the system of administration
hamstrings me

________________________________

Dion Farquhar is a poet with recent poems in /moria, The Dirty Napkin, of(f) course, BlazeVOX, Hamilton Stone Review/, etc. Her chapbook Cleaving won first prize at Poets Corner Press in 2007, and her first poetry book Feet First will be published by Evening Street Press in August 2010.