The Brooklyn Rail

WEIL

Even though I knew it had no meaning
I tried to take the advice my machine
Was giving me, if sheathed in the wariness
Of the times. They call it the Gen
Z frown which has been pulling my face
Down these twenty years. Conan O’Brien’s
Oscars Monologue went silent ten minutes in,
A QR code appeared over his face with an ungrammatical
Command to click the link in comments: pay
To hear the rest. How low of our entertainment
Industry to which I already paid the most hopeful
Of my attentions and for years, and which only earns
My gaze these days in facelifts and clips. I keep
Trying to care. I could care if I could buy into the dream.
Attention: the rarest and purest form of prayer—or so
Our prophet had it—we gave them everything, we paid
Them everything, but Bitches
We’re the entertainment now, whether somebody
Is blowing us up or we are getting dressed, taking
An unfiltered moment to cry. The fact I’ll watch
Anything is proven by the fact that I have.
Another page-white day, but this time wet.
New York was Canadian Tundra then Norwegian
Spring, now Portland or British winter again
So I might remain in the indoor chambers
Of my heart, far from the sky, far from the sun,
Far from the light of my machines, my heart who
Tries her best to flush my guts in spite
Everything—with oxygen.

I SAW THE BEST MINDS OF MY GENERATION

I saw them

And I watched them

While what watched them in me

Shrank from view

They did things I could not do

Displayed themselves like the villain

In Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Who as I recall was an envious pink brain

Controlling with joysticks a giant robot body

A brain perhaps angry it had no body of its own

Doing things to other living things

Doing things without empathy to them

It bothers me that to split an atom

You basically turn a mirror ball inside out

You build an interior of mirrors

To which the atom is somehow subjected

(I should look this up…. but not til the poem is over….)

You subject the atom to the dilated light of its own reflection

In a closed space from which it cannot escape

You isolate and reflect it a billion times

(The figure a billion is synecdochal to an immense number

That I don’t know how to name….. The figure “a billion”

Is the preferred term the collective has settled on

These days to denote “enough...”)

You isolate and reflect the atom a billion times in an atmosphere

Of no escape until it splits. And when it splits

It kills. Unless there is nothing

In its wide vicinity to kill, in which case its explosion

Could be comprehended as nonviolent.