“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