“see, even cleverbot says ben is someone who drowned!”

can it decode how static is to passive graphics

is to bedazzled gray water on tap

you drink down with “elegies of emptiness” freezing

a text box on screen:

you’ve met with a terrible fate. and haven’t you?

your eyes spiking like a gif, in tungsten goop

halftransparent with a plastic sheen,

reminders of your mom dizzystar around you

in pings, (if you stop looking, please, you—)

messages manipulated by mercurial charm

what is there to miss (—could just delete them—)

when you push yourself straight through the skull,

brain packed with softboiled eggs left out in the sun too long—

brain needs a pressurized bath,

crack open the skull a bit, right through the eye with wetbright

white fluorescents (—there’s nothing to grieve—)

you asked for it, didn’t you? and now you’ve run out of time

to go back, rewind back to the same 72 hours

replaying them as if that has any sway on the outcome

(—when there’s no memory of the body

belonging to you, how mother poured your bathwater

in the shape of you how it forms so fluid

of delta sediment from a beachtown,

a vacation where you played at Chuck E. Cheese,

winning vampire teeth with $20 worth of coins,

the void it mouths as it sits in your hands

on the way back to the hotel, chattering its spongy fangs

with misplaced joy that spoils in the sun

to fear stinking of puttied yolk and you’re back

in the bathroom again, mother tying string

in your mouth and instructing you to slam the door

how does it feel when she claims she doesn’t want

to do it because she doesn’t want to cause you pain

but she’ll spiral shadows, flickering spectrums of light

in this memory, too, and the takeaway? she’s worried

if you don’t do it soon, she won’t be able to collect

all your baby teeth she’ll keep in a musty drawer

twenty whole years from now

a reminder how she loves and how much she loves you.)

and you don’t like CBT saying to stop fussing

and beg for forgiveness but are you sure that’s what

it’s saying when you have an ear to air,

somewhere stuffed by static in passive movement,

fizzling vision to gray to nothing?