it's June again

and my mind is split across hemispheres

and I am living a polar opposite life

here, I am my own Colosseum

in a battle against thixotropic feelings

unsure whether to call this

the longest day, or

the longest night

ten years ago:

we had free reign of the guest house

cozied up on the northern bank of the dividing line

over-looking an alternate city parking Lot unwarned by angels

where a dead-end gas station clerk

attended to an altar of burning sulfides --

his heart no doubt a victim of Salt

in my pocket

I had two shards of Herkimer quartz

cut out of dolomite rock from the high hills of New York

popular among warlock cave-divers

and part-time witches

in rolling two fingers of my right hand over a right angle,

it seems I am missing the point —

our relics have outlived their rituals

they must have said something once

like a shy teenager trying for a date to the big dance

only to get trapped by a cave-in of his own doing

the piercing sound of a missed shot

ricochets around his head in infinite reverb

long after the conversation

has already moved on

marriage is different now

that the London economists have learned

you can cure depression with

planned obsolescence

what good are diamonds

when the hardware store

reminds us with encrusted circular saws

that we are nearing the peak of the hardness scale

the words "precious" and "forever"

have more to do with re-sale value than commitment

in an Age of free markets

and free-er love

in our disembodied tradition

have we come to favour the caret over the shtick?

can we no longer see that the issue is multi-faceted?

***

there are parts they leave out of fairy tales:

-the carousel of solarised computer screens

set hexagonally in an MDF laminate facet

-the iridescent LCD glistening like an Asscher cut

connected by a counter-clockwise helix of blue ethernet cables

that fall like rain out of a hole in the drop-ceiling,

defibrillating the heart of

the purpose-built municipal alienation machine

where you submit your legal names to the Department

of Births, Deaths, and Marriages

-the pressing down of worn out letters on a 6-pin membrane keyboard

the grooves filled by an alluvial deposit

of cigarette ash and trailmix dust

-the zed and queue still intact

-the deli-counter ticket

-the incandescent waiting room

-the assembly-line celebrant

-the official letterhead

-the bank surcharge

you know

every best day in someone's life

is someone else's worst

in the evening we heard the news

that his wife had found him dead with a razor in his hand

having slit his own jugular after a collect call from the SEC

people say they caught him insider trading

on a botched vaccine for the inevitable

the wake looked like a party

there was no body and no keening

the balloons reminded us of the ephermeral

the conversations were appropriate for the office

the weather this, the weather that

did you see the game?

the make-up was obvious

the widow wore a diamond ring on her index finger

paid for in full by his index fund

the table was a smorgasbord

the Kosher meat basked in a lukewarm irony

like a shechita porchetta, sliced up

beside a tray of passed-over lasagna trying its hardest to tell us,

"look, there are layers to these things"

at least he fulfilled the Covenant

how few of us wait 'til Death Do Us Part

even if, as it were, sped up by a short cut

in our disembodied tradition

have we not mastered the art of the surface?

are we not adroit crasftmen

concealing every incidental blemish

behind a plasterboard of custom-made fittings,

ashamed of the true nature of things?

I guess what I'm trying to say

is that our relics have outlived their rituals

in sheltering our naked tenderness from the cold winds of change

we forget why we do things

in the first place