from ambient poems
hi
this is my
algorithmic expression
my
me
slowly
becoming an NPC
an encrypted moth
a placeless i
in an ambient
logic that wants forgetting
yet persits like a vapor or a ghast
an infinite simp for noise and capital
as all of the enemies arrive in limousines
the reality debris’
liminal slippage
your never ending dance platform
will this survive another season of oblivion
I am not broken
I am touchless
from ambient poems
here
let me show you
my second or third favorite
apocalyptic baseball photo
a fiery welkin
scrim of the great adaptation
a haze so thick it’s omniscient
the fossil record
tracked in atmosphere
the mineral sky
askance to vision
the angle of
every molecule
reconfiguring
the real’s
genre of prophecy
you were a million gemstones
falling down the stairwell
a shard of light rolling along the table
off the edge and cracks across the floor
spectrum glimmering
a multidimensional
lattice of time
I have no dream job
I do not dream of labor
Notes
using ‘hi’ as a way to set up a poem is from Logan Fry’s “Furnace” in Afternoon Visitor #8
“you were a million gemstones / falling down the stairwell” is from Chad VanGaalen
“I have no dream job / I do not dream of labor” is from @mrhamilton
Robert Balun is a Lecturer in the Program in Writing and Rhetoric at Stony Brook University, and a PhD Candidate in English. He is the author of the poetry collections Acid Wester (The Operating System) and Traces (Ursus Americanus Press). His poems have appeared in American Poetry Journal, Reality Beach, Powder Keg, TAGVVERK, Tammy, Prelude, Barrow Street, Apogee, Cosmonauts Avenue, and others. His first collection of scholarship, An Ethics of Thinking and Making in the Anthropocene: The Aesthetics of Disruption, is forthcoming from Routledge in 2025. He also teaches poetry workshops with Brooklyn Poets.