Two Poems | Robert Balun

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2 mins read

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.