THE TERMINATOR

Mankind raged for decades

A rage that created a clandestine alienation

A muted place

A piano key silent when struck

As we know, the night is dark

And in those nights of falsehoods

In the negativity that had tenure in our thinking

The world tanned and pocked

It quaked and ran fluid

With legislature preening holograms of worrisome science

In conference rooms normally left in semicircles of Quaker stillness

They instructed us to behave unilaterally

But without an axis

To circumvent the pillory of fearmongering

To disregard the environment of origin 

As proof we can alter and tweeze every habitation without a true knowledge

Of how it works but with a true belief that it is ours

There was an understanding that the understood was an analog threat

Outer space was a con 

That the bird blood and tree sap were not on our hands

And it was in that understood negativity that ricocheted 

Through the continents a conspiracy that the dyad 

Of sportsmanship and fellow preservation

(Water and Sleep both billion dollar industries)

Was a roleplay 

When what factored into the equation was that most of us

Would never meet the edge of sky that had us jailed

Fetishizing its depletion with each vestige of seasonal light

Setting like a large forehead on the hills across the river

 Ourselves falling asleep to the tractor trailers downshifting lullaby

The archery of rain framed in our lit doorways

A kitchen drawer with various sauce packets

Like the flag of an annexed territory

Our own appetites luring us through a hotline of side effects

The whole world having been at some point put in various types of mouths

A rudimentary ouroboros

The Terminator; the line where day and night converge

A violated circumference of defense

That will again be fought here, tonight

To await the spaghetti dawn light

Through the sparse locust trees

A narrative that ran parallel to ultimatums

As if the heavens were an adjustable mechanism

These sharp plotless clouds, rain

Rainbows

Eric Amling is the author of From the Author's Private Collection (Birds, LLC, 2015) and Wet Manual, forthcoming from b l u s h. He is an editor of After Hour Editions and lives in Kingston, NY.