Counterbug by Ayla Rogers

Counterbug by Ayla Rogers  

My narrative’s full of missing plot points,

But Joey never knew how to fill them;

As though his brief cameos would suffice

To cultivate coherent character,

With agency to reprogram his life,

To recode outdated algorithms,

And erase burdensome memory banks.

I hope your figure-crunching can compute--

The draught we drank so satisfied our thirst,

For getting some--somewhere else with poison

That we squirmed through the substance like serpents

Parched for knowledge, or something much sweeter

To drown in, to gorge till fermentation

Sinks us softly, deeper in this wormhole--

Starved for cyanide and seedy strangers

To rot a brain so wrought by cognition,

 To rend the gnarl’d neural tree limb from limb.

Staggering through dusk to limp at daybreak--

Crippled by clarity and the thud, thud

Of blood and the chug, chug of new notions:

The futility of Hobbesian choice,

The carnal draw of Hegel’s dialect,

Nietzsche’s endless overcoming and strife--

All at war in this frail female body--

This empty vessel buzzing with insects,

Like his freshly fallen corpse lay writhing,

At last livelier within than without.

If you met the torment of dissonance,

How these minced words resemble my organs

When they enter through some null orifice,

You would feel me precisely when I say:

‘Philosophers disdain their new ideas

For at least three weeks after grasping them’--

You’d understand me tightening my grip

Around your throat, only to make sounds come.

It’s not the occupation I trained for--

Conducting this chaotic symphony--

And though I’d blow this whistle till I’m blue,

Steam engines keep barreling down the tracks,

Like an unanswerable word problem.

Some unsolvable hypothetical

Proceeds from numerical reduction

Of unquantifiable trains of thought,

Inventing with incalculable speed,

Some brilliant feat of engineering

To re-route a course doomed for collision,

Or rescue some whiney hog-tied damsel,

If only to shut-up her blathering

With the Siren song of fatality.

Were he a prince he’d choose the sleeping dame,

Inert and beyond the pangs of poison--

Apples and pity roses at his grave

Add irony to finding love in death.

As though he could touch someone from his cloud--

The twelfth floor office of a job he hates.

His lust for the concrete and greenery,

Romancing the tops of trees and buildings,

Supposing he savors the scenery.

Too far to fuck, for all his frustration,

So he writes the code for a counterbug,

And relinquishes his recent winnings.

Formulating a perfect sabotage

To escape the job he’s always hated--

Closing my pages, he shuts the window. 

                                                                                                                                                                                   

Selected Recent and New Errors
BY DEAN YOUNG B. 1955My books are full of mistakes
but not the ones Tony’s always pointing out
as if correct spelling is what could stop the conveyor belt
the new kid caught his arm in.
Three weeks on the job and he’s already six hundred
legal pages, lawyers haggling in an office
with an ignored view of the river
pretending to be asleep, pretending
to have insight into its muddy self.
You think that’s a fucked-up, drawn-out metaphor,
try this: if you feel you’re writhing like a worm
in a bottle of tequila, you don’t know
it’s the quickness of its death that reveals
the quality of the product, its proof.
I don’t know what I’m talking about either.
Do you think the dictionary ever says to itself
I’ve got these words that mean completely
different things inside myself
and it’s tearing me apart?
My errors are even bigger than that.
You start taking down the walls of your house,
sooner or later it’ll collapse
but not before you can walk around
with your eyes closed, rolled backwards
and staring straight into the amygdala’s meatlocker
and your own damn self hanging there.
Do that for awhile and it’s easier to delight
in snow that lasts about twenty minutes
longer than a life held together
by the twisted silver baling wire
of deception and stealth.
But I ain’t confessing nothing.
On mornings when I hope you forget my name,
I walk through the high wet weeds
that don’t have names either.
I do not remember the word dew.
I do not remember what I told you
with your ear in my teeth.
Further and further into the weeds.
We have absolutely no proof
god isn’t an insect
rubbing her hind legs together to sing.
Or boring into us like a yellow jacket
into a fallen, overripe pear.
Or an assassin bug squatting over us,
shoving a proboscis right through
our breast plate then sipping.
How wonderful our poisons don’t kill her.