The tournament brackets of our fate
decorate the aquamarine armoires, chairs liquefy down
from ceilings like iridescent tears,
and there's a shitload of gluey blue stuff everywhere.

Life hints of an ordered docility,
of a soupy lucidity,
of a saturated toxicity.

You can hear it in the oxidized buzz
of overgrown wasps, you can taste it in the really strong
pina-coladas they serve outside the cathedrals.

Because lifetimes can vaporize in the nitrogen-fueled
effluvium, even the kiddies will know
how to properly pack a bag.

And among the swank aliens, whose glabrous skin
shimmers like an oasis,
bean-thin is in, the better mannered speak with elegant
Shakespearean accents,

and, as in the days of yore,
if you can levitate iron filings off a mirrored marble slab
the hostess will be mightily impressed
and summon forth some wine.

Surprisingly, the El Camino is back, with tricked out
hourglass cockpit and thermal guided
personnel annihilator.

That's the good news.

The bad is our anxiety and fear,
which have been stretched to the dimensions
of an interstellar limo.

For safety, one can purchase tiny, poison-billed, albatross-
shaped darts.

Sadly, the robots we'll be required to build as children,
to replace our asthmatic fathers
and watch over us as the cosmos speed through our
still-delicate bodies,

eventually they'll grow lonely with dents
and stuttered gears.

You'll find them then in the swiveling hover-cafes
sipping oily coffee, reading a poetry of zeros and ones.

When you look into their honeycombed, pink-lit eyes,
you'll know exactly what they are thinking.

____

My sense of future is a ridiculous amalgamation of creature features and science fiction films from when I was 10 years old. These days I'm obsessed with desire and loss, how the surreal reveals itself through the ordinary, and with finding humor in all things. "Future Poem" was a lucky break, an idea that invited my obsessions and what I enjoy about poetry back to the hotel where the manager didn't mind if the furniture got tossed.