michael borth — the zygote

THE ULTRASOUND

The current is timeless. 
If you exist or existed or will exist
or do not exist you are within it, 
you make it by its carriage. 
Singular and plural within it and of it, 
you are the cut for the water to river,
the cable for the atemporal plasmatic milk,
the spearmint lightning flash
a hint of the untouchable network. 
Flockshapes are your letters
the wind is the grammar
the memory in this present the word.
It is all right here, unseen, unwanted, borne.
It is the hypnotic litany of future ghosts.
It is a resplendent language
that speaks in rusted toasters
and pregnant heroin queens
smoking in the red prismatic sparkle of gifted jewel.
Grandfathers reborn in livingroom dreams,
more upright and extolling
and your attention is an open hand,
a waiting device in the mutated space.
Here you find every iteration of yourself
which is the self that entertains 
through purposely botched duplication,
ideas like resurrected titans from the 
hyperwhite lagoon at the edge of the endoplanet.
Stated version in precision marble
there are sculpted fists in the ridges of your hair,
heated eyelines in glowing balletic appetites 
in scenarios fostered to render the divine child
of sequential ghetto, of lumbering quadrant. 
Protracted mimesis, beguiling enemas,
a mysterious fourth in every dream,
becoming lucid and exhibernated
becoming animal and sleepeasy,
the silent delta of regenerative energy continues to branch
remembering all but blessing you
with one or two of its infinite orders,
the epilogue of the photocopied birth certificate,
extracted liquids are now bowing herds in the shale of dawn,
you are required to serve the ohmage,
the vibrational root system, the floating spherical tree,
the fungal vertices and the polygons of ore,
all of it bands on the singular spectrum 
that ever expands and never grows, 
the numbers are merely the black peaks
of the indivisible range and the mountain lakemirrored,
a calibrated wilderness in the carbon desert,
in the morass of microscopic discovery,
the discoveries made by the tools they pushed
through the dark earth of the one imagination,
though one goes from one million to high noon,
food for our food, nebulae for our pupils,
windchime and domed matrix for the blind,
when the snake is finished with its tail 
it becomes a spontaneous pulse 
in the first frame of the ultrasound. 



THE WOUND

The golden zygote
at the core of the tesseract
is at twelve percent halo removal
and the widespread
failure to heal
has become a symptom 
of the foundational sickness. 
Incompetent youth.
Incapacitated, naïve.
Fools in the harsh withdrawal
of bounties never stacked.
Babes in the fetish
of remorseless feeding.

You are not in the world
where you are not injured
you are in this one. 
You are the one 
who must keep awakening.
You are the one
who must find and make play
in the pain
knowing the pain
and the awful transfer
of consequential events
in the backwater station
of God’s final outpost. 
You can fix everything
but you cannot fix that
because it is the wound that generates
the floating parallel chimes
and the topography of coincidence.
It is like the first flaw
in the eternal fabric 
unknown to its own perfection.
There must be a mark
an aberration
to build your world around.
You can change everything
and I know you have tried
but you cannot change that.



CANCER IS THE CURE

Cancer is the cure.
Life inflicted on life.
The cataclysmic inferno of biology
and its pathetic paper handfans. 
Ongoing, infeasting, 
a seismic contusion and the food of stress.
Sudden and irrevocable cleaving.
Disgusting ultraviolet glue
and atomic adhesives.
Cells pulsate to ensure 
praise of their useless activity.
Metabolic holocausts. 
Inverted world of clamor trees
hoping for vacuum and tyranny loss.
Breeding is a sickness.
Inevitable accretion.
Images to announce the feeding.
The brain is a cripple.
A barrage of waste. 
Trained by vacuous numbers.
Sparks to warn the shining eyes. 
From gallbladder to spermatozoa.
The fatigue of the cosmos.
The boredom of the movement.
The shudder of the births.
Even death is not enough. 
Nothing controlled. Nothing chosen.
A vomit of impulses
and not even a dream of freedom.
The ideas are more excrement.
Hope is a scream from the bile and rust. 
A tumult of rampant hatreds.
Love a disaster weed.
A mash of testicles for the dayglo scorpions.
Octopi boiled in the soup of pedophiles.
The ladder of scales to the blood rectum.
Angels halved for the feast of the cyclops.
Water is a flame of jagged orifices. 
Myriad pulsations to the egg of novel pain.
The venue of insomniac weathers.
The monarch of all error.
The whores of the sand tearing their lips.
Rabid eagles deranged on the marrow of fetal terrors.
One long abortion of the hemoglobin.
Grey matter turning into cacti.
Patterns yielding to requisite disease. 
Infants hanged by fallopian rope.
Severed heads a collective stone.
Blood is the knife of time. 
Ash the only sacred token.
What burns is real in the total absence.
Glass in the wind.
Bone dust in the locket.
Chattering genitals in the desert of line.
Taste is only a cannibal. 
A bouquet of limp tongues
in the onslaught of passionate slavery.
Flamingo waves.
Awaken to a bed of frogs.
The infinite light is another prison.
Starved and gargantuan and sallow.
Wandering beneath the ovens.
Lost in the game of salvation. 
A nothing, nowhere. 
Joy is an implanted memory.
You are never there. 

MICHAEL BORTH is a writer from the Hudson Valley. His work has appeared in New World Writing, Fence, SPECTRA, Forever Mag, SELFFUCK, Expat Press, Cordite Poetry Review, and The Write Launch. He can be reached here: michaeljborth@gmail.com  



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