poem sequence for his cluster b online girlfriend
by Mark Parsons
The Melancholy of His Cluster B Online Girlfriend
Her catabolic gaze reverse-effervesces,
Breaks down to assimilate all who surround her,
Wherever she casts her eye or attention.
Another one of her circle dies,
And the hatred left for the one she loves,
Who remains, like rays of the sun
Through a convex lens, grows stronger:
The watched cephalopod,
His soft
Mollusk body
Tremulous, billowing,
Never moves
But like sand in a desert
Wind-storm is
Movement registered,
The direction and speed of the current
Evident,
And the love and devotion
She showers on those now gone
Is diluted a little more.
The Unassailable Conviction of His Cluster B Online Girlfriend
Her low profile and gentle grade
deflects, deforms,
ricochets,
glancing away
his “direct approach,”
like the armour slope of a glacis plate
shape-charged questions
can’t penetrate. This is the interface.
The steep pitch of her
logic,
ramparts—
the stones quarried
as big as the rooms for rent
in a boarding house.
This is the fortress, a vault.
Higher up,
where the turret sits,
phase array
radar guides
shotgun spray
pellets forming
in air,
mid-flight,
countermeasure
of hard-kill clouds;
high explosive reactive
plate, wedged apart,
thrusts a panel to break the jet
and disrupt the path
of an armor-piercing kinetic energy, sabot-stripped
steel flechette. Every radio beam
released, steered detached by the nanosecond,
in unison sweeps the field
like a brush of the softest most supple bristles,
to trace the outline and mark the presence of foreign objects,
like a lover’s hand that fondles a souvenir
of an ill-fated love affair. This is the star-crossed lover’s
reaction-time, lacking all doubt.
POV Invention for His Cluster B Online Girlfriend
Perched in a chief executive cupola
Furnished with metabolic activity dashboard
And first-person video stream,
She can now
Finally
Feel secure
In his very banal existence,
At present freed from the void of imagination
And all its terrible monsters,
Questions of
Correlation and cause
Resolving before her eyes,
Interpersonal intimacy
Broken down into data points
Second by second,
Cell respiration and energy transfer updated
In real time, and combined in a biometric report she can then compare
To his basal rates, with a visual overlay.
Image of Mark Parsons
BIO: Mark Parsons is the author of 4 books of poems, Stills (Southernmost Books), The Kingdom of Middle Children (Southermost Books), Spiral (Anxiety Press), and Welcome to Charleyville, forthcoming from McBussy Publishing.