GRAY AGPALO

Newborn

upon taciturn dawn

a collapsed sassafras

divided the driveway

inconveniencing us

our machines our

appointments and money

our grave tradition

is an obsequious tome

in reading it I became

a student of refusal

if upon getting born

we are told to root

for a certain death

we ought to choose wisely

a corrective officer’s salary

cushy without succor

is blown up

on the back of a bus

my hapless eye squints

to mimic the jail windows

tracking the isomorphism

between suffering

as the state is wont to do

⥀

capital probes the perpetual

question of love’s enoughness

romantics obscure both

its frailty and lack’s affluence

such that love yields liberally

to be clear

I’m less hater qua hater

more like living & paying

rent & looking around

in the end love is meritocracy

like the beached anglerfish

is perverted aberration

or pure complaint

revealing the brute base

dying in broad daylight

of course we have the work

of ontological rehab

cut out for each other

when the World rots

I pray for death

to sick nettling

factions to diagnosis

and cure to annihilation

of invasive species

those magnificent survivalists

⥁

an oceanic feeling

will protygynously persist

wide-eyed wrasses turning

wordlessly to reinvent

sex change ovum

for encrypted sperm

transsexualling into what

exactly? I don’t know

is desire a question

about completion?

sunflowers get planted

to absorb nuclear fallout

of course the job calls

for their destruction

the complete pre-colony

is now pure fantasy

yes I root

for the World’s rot

slow the omniscient fern

blinks sporadic clocks

Gray Agpalo is a writer. They are Communications Editor of Apogee Journal and a member of the collective, Sick in Quarters. He lives in Philadelphia.