he said what is awesome is that everything functions. the terror of it all. a god in decline pining over
sweaty plutocracies/ever increasing unities

functioning faster toward a certain death derailed by the promise of metal and screws./i want
someone to intervene in the disorder of things

it’s not a gravity/less flag but a massive shift in perspective not made possible by technologies that
drive and derive from this endless functioning.

he wants a radical rupture/a messianic promise/a futurity determined by tradition but tradition is
never a singular sign extended to a force outside us

tradition contains its own felt histories/which multiply and wash over petrified containers of
words. of wounds.

there are others, speaking/but they do not require his ear to interpret. they weigh their own
meanings./he dreams of another symbolic system that never sacrifices its own

but his language is too functional. it records a presumption that one can master time or transcend
its grip/and everything keeps functioning. cannot be stopped.

everything functional assumes too much.

*

Alison Reed’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in several journals including Skin to Skin, Cactus Heart, Femme Dreamboat, and So to Speak, and she was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is pursuing her PhD in English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she is taking a brief respite from the city life she longs for.