What new name will you bear in a world governed by code and calculation
What program will reveal the ratio between communal identities and the loss of the body
You are not known or pronounced
Your nonce nonchalance does not convince
Your scores are neither high enough to qualify, nor deep enough to be legible, nor detailed enough to play from
Custodian of nothing, childless, rude and startled
So many scintillating shards or conversations when things shatter
Savagely unbodied by the microscopic architecture of psalmless palm
Drawn means tired or created or a naked sword or tied up and torn asunder
It’s not loving someone who can’t love you back, but the end of loving them that’s the saddest
Now emotional intimacy has tech, yoga has tech, sex has tech, even tech has tech
You don’t even know what day it is, what the weather is like or where you’re supposed to be next
Let yourself be found like water through rocks, you are what’s lost, you are the pool collecting in the ground
Speak now speak always speak in the long undrawn colloquy of night
Copyright © 2018 Kazim Ali. Used with permission of the author. This poem originally appeared in Kenyon Review, September/October 2018.