Bullets breathe through
the sky of my mouth and my teeth
record them all: caplets of momentary
light strafing twilit buildings. Or is it a
blur of countryside. A bright district of
popular cafes. The body of a whale
disincorporating at the bottom of the sea.
It’s a human trick we play on top of the
very own trick of our blood: placing our
cameras just far enough away to convince
ourselves the people we are uncoiling are
not really people at all. We dismiss the
death as tape glitch and lens flare and
faulty intelligence, as garbled facts on the
ground. We dismiss the damage as a deep
dissolve and dust motes dancing in the
backlighting of the steadicam. I could tell
you this is the safety we should all be
afraid. I could tell you we should have the
guts to look each person in the eye before
we rechristen them collateral. But who am
I to judge these men and women when I
don’t have the guts to face them or this
world on its own crude, unbridled terms.
Who am I to argue against the self-defense
of keeping distance, keeping discrete. Who
am I to decide whether it’s good for drone
pilots to be able to drive home each night
and have dinner with their families or if
some moral bond is lost forever through
such flagrant disconnection. And who am
I to decide that one of those possibilities
necessarily excludes the other. The body
of a whale disincorporating at the bottom
of the sea is a metropolis of creatures alive
because of its disincorporation. I’m the
one who can tell you to your face that I
believe in moral absolutes but, if pressed,
not exactly what those absolutes are. I’m
the one who wakes up each morning and
erases, deletes, minimizes, revises, and
swipes away. I’m the one who powers
down and creates new tabs and undoes
typing and closes out to dashboard. I’m
the one who changes the channel, hits
mute, closes my eyes, plugs my ears. I’m
the one who leaves the room, heaves the
flatscreen through the living room
window, takes an axe to the electrical box,
pries the porcine masks of the power
outlets off of their fatfuck faces. I’m the
one who rips all my fucking cables and
cords and surge protectors from the walls
and cauterizes their necks so their heads
can never grow back. We’ve devised and
cultivated so many avenues of avoidance
that I could burn all my bridges, cut all my
ties, go off every grid, bivouac at the
remotest Arctic outpost, or crash land
myself inside the darkest lungs of the
moon, but I’d still be culpable for all of
this violence. Just like you.

*

Adam Fell is the author of DEAR CORPORATION, which will be published in Fall 2013 by H_NGM_N Books. His first book of poetry I AM NOT A PIONEER (H_NGM_N Books 2011) was awarded the Posner Book Award from the Council for Wisconsin Writers. He lives in Madison, WI, where he teaches at Edgewood College and co-curates the Monsters of Poetry Reading Series.