Poem: At the Keyboard

 

At the Keyboard

 

fingertips.  bishops and rooks primed.  

diagonal.  orthogonal.

hostage to a rash hopscotch,

obsessed yet servile

over sleek prim tiles.

troublesome tiles, tiles which somehow 

invoke the odor of Darth Vader’s chest.

 

my eyes track mumbo jumbo.

ears dog a ridicule of clicks.

hours of this.  hands twin crabs 

doing the mountebank shuffle.

fingertips--later--

fade through a falter of clog dance.

 

heart yanked

as if in an Id-space-time machine:

Z's to ampersands,

drowsy then aroused.

gleeful hate and fear and sex.

commas are chores then look like semen.

hyphens become hymens

wasting their innocence.

 

'how long 

can the repeated period marks last?'

my fingerprints ask to erode drip by drip.

'how much touch can i lose

on this psycho-topo-dramo-topological trip?'

whether to retreat,

exhausted yet stimulated 

from this multiemotional mission,

should i

into the far simpler math 

of a game of chess.  

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10/3/24 eds.