“I was fascinated by T. Person’s dense and multivalent fragments. It seemed to me like a mind in the process of thinking: inquisitive, sometimes chaotic, punctuated by hesitations and interruptions. The first line of his fragments (‘Day and night: thorough outlets’) struck me as a koan of sorts. It seemed like a good starting point, which led me into my own meditation on social media and how pervasive it has become. Am I finished with the poem? Or is a poem ever finished? Like a Facebook feed, the process of writing and rewriting is always ongoing, and I think the important thing is to consider the text in the here and now, mirroring Person’s question: what would I offer the birds if they came to roost?”

 

 

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Feed

 

 

day & night / thorough outlets / the hours unscrolling

 

viral videos from moment to given moment

 

again & again & again / a boomerang

 

cipher for i am here / kill me now / just kidding

 

not kidding / sometimes i feel like a hashtag thrown

 

in as afterthought / torrent of & as trivia

 

murmuration / a sound / a flock of whirling birds

 

what would i offer to them if they came to roost

 

maybe the self / mirrored on the camera / reverse

 

image / to become all mouth / feeding on what is

 

given / each click bait a trap door / tumbling headlong

 

into link after link / an hour has passed / more / nothing

 

happens / i can’t tell what the shape of it actually

 

is / it must be something / perhaps a web / a cloud

 

 

 

 

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