Intellectual Reproduction, or, Rights & Violations

I.

For a limited period of time
a system of relationships and dynamic access
can entail the attribution of
a responsibility to a greater congress
when in fact the recent trend
to surveil the unauthorized
may result in a chilling reproduction
of the past
and the products
of the past
and the stark direction of a new incentive
into a blank horizon.

II.

Periods of the past have reproduced
and their unauthorized relationships
blank out the horizon,
their congress surveilled and directed
by the past's own products
and their stark trends towards
chilling systems and all that the system entails
(for such time that the period is limited).

III.

A labor ethos, dispossessed and
uncontrolled, sees the product of its labor
as a reflection of its expropriation
from the tight black camera lens
of history
and its products—
but those revolving doors and windowshades
still wait in stark galleries
and sleeping pens
and the inky products of those pens
and histories.

IV.

A reflection on the lens of sleep
is underway—a shifting violator,
rehabilitated and taught to abandon
its stories and its sex,
compacted into rights and violations
and unclear like an annihilated water
without an access, or a system,
or an ethos—and its labors
still enable the fickle art of
dread engagement, beds disheveled
and debated as a model or a mayhem
and attributed as such
in the monetized production
of time.

—Manhattan, April 14, 2010

A Hymn to New Ghosts

A Hymn to New Ghosts

We sang a hymn to new ghosts and old fears
and dusty canons of schematics,
beatific orders of Resistors and Amperes:

Hallowed ghosts of code
that

the hard ghosts of metal,
aluminum and steel,
proud yet pliant as the flower's petal;

the sacred electric ghosts who charge
down upon our wires,
strand upon strand, large

and looming on the breadboard's pale horizon.
No meter measures better the currents of our time:
Watching, seeing, her eyes on

gold and starmatter,
tin and rusted works of art,
fertile as magnetic fields.

—Brooklyn, ~December 15, 2009