Lo-Fi Citadels

Now that I have been estranged from them, the corridors and signals 
of the grid seem little more than an intrusion on the landscape 

and the people commuting through it, like a bar band stumbling 
through “Superstition” before a captive audience of waitstaff. It’s raining 

in the suburbs, in the city, the ditches and imaginary borders between, 
and tonight, the spirit of confusion descending on them demands of me 

a recounting of their surfaces and gestures, a private map that might 
make sense of all the pieces: there’s you, huddled above the street 

in your secret citadel composed of vinyl records and newsprint,
and here’s me, curbside, like a survivor of some eliminated time line,
 
dispatched by you, my lover, on an unlikely mission to the grocery store 
for blackberries. Toward the cruiser idling in the corner of the lot 

I whisper, false earth, toward the shopping cart and the invisible sicknesses 
encircling us, false earth, but to acknowledge the face of the machine 

we are caught in doesn’t change a thing: we are irradiated by nine-to-five, 
irradiated by broadcast and infrastructure. How to get in somewhere 

before the cold comes is the game I’ve always been unconsciously 
squandering my quarters in, and maybe it’s the crowd of strangers milling 

before the register with their bags of Technicolor peppers and gallon jugs, 
or maybe it’s the long aisle leading me back out into the catastrophe 

of Wednesday evening, but once I think to look for them, the strongholds 
we’ve established among the asphalt’s interludes reveal themselves 

as everywhere: the park bench where you swear you got me drunk on wine 
the week we met, which I remember nothing of but still accept as canon, 

the house you used to rent, where, one incandescent Saturday, we found 
compelling reasons to stay in. These fictions we are growing to inhabit 

aren’t less sincere than any others, than the grid itself, sustained thus far
on a calamity of motion. Here, in our obsolescence, we are revised endlessly 

like a taped-over videocassette, and love, at the first break in the weather 
I will return with as many blackberries as our dead tech frames can hold.