Three Poems
Will Vincent
Have a Body Again
Enter the poem, reader—through pixel
light under the bitmapped sky.
Choose, reader, between mind and sword:
Mind grants you beaches, serenity, and vacation anxiety.
Sword, politics and the blood song of football.
Walk the path I shoveled for you, hug
cubes dug from our private
shared earth, and build toward the portal
with an obsidian crown.
Together we could pop open a hole
in another long wall.
Beckoned by no sprite, save
my voice over the wires, a few
misspelled signs and the sun falling a perfect square.
We nudge together, reader,
toward something built by human clicks
pushing advantage and counter-advantage.
Deep in the folders, we adjust the numbers
to shower ourselves with unearned wealth,
so we can dig forever through wild soil.
Our tools never break on the last black page.
We can destroy everything that gurgles in the dark
cave systems just beyond our reach:
creatures that hate all that we love.
Ending the undead never felt so silly
chests echoing with caged phlegm
like too many toads in the bottom of a well.
Return home, reader, with me—with a pack
full of things we never meant to pick up:
gold, torn cloth, the hilt of a sword.
Hero
What is this some sort of journey
through the guts
toward your most empowering
worm? What if I told you I was falling forever
in the rain in a video that you flicked past—
thumb hot for the next dream
like I was the past or a sighed yes.
I don’t even remember my life as I live it.
What if the past is only tickering in the arcade
but there is no freedom in the game,
only in the realization that you are totally alone
to collect each berry and boarhide and key
to unlock Christ at any percent.
Like a tentacle, we whip around through the seas
munching sailors in ten grand teeth.
Tasting the nuances of the sailor’s life
like a decadent vampire of the sea, I drink
up his maidenhead and cannon.
My five stomachs and I
in a laughable posture. He holds his shield
against morning dew
as if I am a sky thick with arrows,
or a night dense with stars
who burns for him and to be him, so I eat him, falling
as he coordinates his own
against me through mic and feed.
Hot Inside the Moth
after the bug swallows me it is warm
warm in its body near its soul
I was sold to him
by a gnome with a penchant for trickery
3 pence and some goblin change
old men cook bowls of root
lumped in with the sun
to cure me
so we can hike
journey
our sand is your sand
we drink up crabs
folded in the love hunts
love hunts us to the craggy tip
she bends to fold
inside my tunic
looking for chest hair
finding none finding the blade
to exit alone
the encampment fire dim
louder than joyful
as the gull sulks
over the snow
mewling eulogies