Six sonnets by Bradley J. Fest

2014.01

I wish to transcribe Camera Obscura into your oscilloscopes,
forsake the barriers of the next seventeen years for two little
droplets of carbon nanofiber. I will. You’ll see. Many diamond
filaments will crush you with their artificial currency, you’ll see.

I already changed the shape of the envelope, its origami
transmitted through arpeggios, keyboards, and fucking screaming.
I am a boa paladin ready to ruin your day. It’s like a congealing
effect. Dead for so long. Pianos and disaster. My curriculum vitae

and your face. In other words . . . sound. Waiting, perched upon
the ledge of contemporaneity, it’s a Saturday night and y’all
ain’t present. So we’ll choose instead another vendor for our
transgressions in the morning, our climaxed waiting and exasperation.

It’ll probably be someone disreputable in the fog-ridden dawn
of this: our lonely trepidation, our daily failures.

2014.02

I want to blog about sucking the nicotine lozenge
out of the back of your throat while the cruciform
wailing cascades its lonely dirge in the nightmare
of textual nukes raining their desperate fire upon us.

And if we permit your small nicotine ass a certain sway,
a languid motion in the heart of this Kirghiz light, then we’ll
coalesce cigarettes all around these bromide minds,
cantankerous jars on hills, your pathetic Xbox controller. . . .

I was never this much of an American Football archivalist,
a fan of these strange media configurations, these tracks
in the brutal wake of tomorrow’s non-coherence, its nonsensical
pop-hits, tomorrow’s Top 40, your distorted guitar “melodies”

in the Oakenfold miasma of the last decade. I came this close
to total solipsistic self-unawareness. I failed, clearly, hopefully.

2014.03

We are nomadic war machines clashing at fimbulwinter,
orbiting the last necrosun as things depart. We are
the battling multitude of boats on a rising sea. So
what are we written, what imitating? Mere legislators

of our own demise, awash in the sea of our monster project,
our various salts and common woes? Poems about
capitalism and global climate change, plastic (geologic)
futures . . . our imagination precedes us in the age of hyperobjects.

Mimetic failures abound, arguments wash up on zombified
shores of our mass-auditing, awaiting their dissolution and dispersion.
To whom are we then addressed? Surely not the horizon hedge
fund managers project in this, our nightmare-time? But if not them,

then . . . to the imagination? Or to this and Thumbelina as we
only see the most immediate next moment of vibration,
    our pockmarks?

2014.04

Is it not the case that today’s syllabi are not long enough?
Or so I said in a lecture the first day of class about
my meta-commentary on the act of reading syllabi the
first day of class, or so I explained would be what I would

do if this were a class on postmodernism, which it is, punks.
And so, in response to the question I got from those remarks,
I responded, “That was forty years ago!” Meaning, postmodernism
was a long time ago, meaning: meaning was born from your stupid

evangelical fantasies of deathdrumming in the sky. Your fake reality
is better than your other simulation to reality. But my research
is the best. For rather than us thinking that syllabi have grown beyond
any reasonable bounds, it is now so ludicrous to think that students would

actually read that it has become imperative we heap upon them even
more information they will fail to grasp, otherwise our democracy
is doomed.

2014.05

This year of petty tragedies makes me just wanna send bitchy email
replies to students telling them to listen to grunge music.
“Never felt this good . . . us against the world,”¹ whatever:
bitchy tweety correspondence,² you don’t know the half

of what Iggy Azalea’s been through. “Now get this work . . .
workin’ on my shit.” But is this not exactly the case!?
The pleasure of, quite literally, working on one’s own feces?
How could we not get that shit? It’d be like if The Prelude

were some silly sonnet titled by a very late year, in this,
our nightmare age. So we’ll dance. At the end. Because where
else would we be? We’re keeping the secrets, burning for
our better, wholly others while they’re not home. I can see you.

I doubt you could get it how I live on my spaceship to . . .
invite you to the slam dancing minuet later this evening.
So I guess our democracy is doomed.

2014.06

Welcome to the archive of all the music.³ The musical.
It was hidden behind the bookshelf of LPs we forgot
to take with us when we left the first moment of history.
We failed again, for sure. Then Lauren Bacall died.

But memory was reinstituted. Oops, we didn’t ask
for this checksum, this airline stock actually rallying a bit
this morning. We had to do a second draft on the murder
investigation. The fingerprints were the worst instants of

any crime and it supported exceptionalism. But Noam Chomsky
was absolutely innocent. We checked. Twice. Before this
dead sinking story. And then Operation Ivy stormed in and
made everything okay. It was like The French Revolution

“a mean love,” for sure. We’ll volta. The world is our opponent,
unless negotiations prove otherwise. And believe me, they won’t.