Hypostasis
for Raymond Hammond

Faith is anemic, propane
blue--sulphur-pox:
kelvin or rankine, scaled to a thermodynamics
of absolute zero and zero
is the adiabat S = 0: the lapse rate
of cold transferring rapture to hoarfrost
and ring-billed gulls.

It depurifies as clot-hours circle 
in arcs of new sparks, hacked
to pieces in shifts of frenzied stupor.  
Signs of send rescind and cloy
and warp--scatter, splinter, bless.
Its dead were dead before undead in edits:
hack marks of corpses alive by sous
rature. Mentors are the gravitons
of a petite mort--release oxytocin
to swap spleen for on your knees.

Pray to appease Asmodai,
zombied with fog horns in the dark, hollow
hole of salted ousia. Antic disposition
or ontic dispossession? Never feigned.
Always canonic. To be the tilted palm,
packing in the prick-light of prayer,
Asmodai is Iago bloated as faith's
negation. Tongues are unsigned.
The haloed flecks of posthumanity 
still like shards in stasis for you,
among the elect, cleaving
to a dead man's clysmic
tip of pass. 





The Temptation of Rachel Godbot
for Daniel Morris

The skin of the face is that which stays most naked, most destitute.
It is the most naked, though with a decent nudity. The face is meaning
all by itself. It leads you beyond.
--Emmanuel Levinas

Rachel Godbot with 3-D human face in onyx light
tweets "opting out is not an option,"-- massy, handheld
and low-lying, in part anointed and elected, mingled
with grimoire and bestiarum in a black case and glassy
usenet screen glare. Her waking eyes squint, primed
for late codes of drash, lids soaked by a slippery mean
of seven trillion. Her zombie networks of intimacy
spearphish thumb-hearts of Spoetry, Flarf, wink at ready-
mades with their disposable app of plurivocality to settle
on the antique instant of the arriere-garde eblasting news
of a godbot in digits. Maximum goodput? She does a

Google search for sequins and comes up with disk-shaped
beads or a gold coin in the Venetian Republic, also called
zecchino formerly minted in Italy, Turkey and Malta.
She circumvents the prurience and tags sequins as UML
sequence diagrams from Apokalypse Software Corp,
coy developers of a godbot in spam code. Yielding
fields stalk users with their ghosted submit and cascading
style sheets set as trompe l'oeil. A death march of product?
A ransack of theos? Address munging?  She takes Bacn
spam as her unhurried bond with its posthuman implex
of IrcBot.png (387 × 34 pixels, file size: 2 KB, MIME
type: image/png). ''Don't fret the laws of kashrut,'' she says

with her risqué, automated voice, ''use fakon.'' In dark
wit, the dim apotheosis of her mortal coil becomes a
chatterbot with a Markov chain. Did she settle the query,
face-to-face, peer-to-peer, melding new and old tropes
''between the pass and fell incensed points of mighty
opposites?'' Yes, on Tuesday night during the power
outage with meta-names: back glitch, back tick, birk,
blugle and unapostrophe @files=`6.13/:יהוה>\windows\
temp. What's next? In her wake, the speculated mass--
.html, .htm, .asp, .aspx, .php, .jsp, .jspx and slash--over-
load the archive. It must be new. It can't be. Make a
digital reliquary with daguerreotype and camera obscura,
facebooked in Claude glass on an iphone and call it a social
media event. She jests at the quick nonchalance but stops
in to sequester a brave new web stirred as a hermeneut's
quest for variety in the pointillism of signal strength.

"Let's bloodlet a tablet and speak choppy, broken lines
of burrow, fetter, pitch and spin the psychotropics of ipads 
with medicated fans," she says.  Virus. She's infected,
remembers her ethical throat-- the pharynx, jugular
and binary hack of a chemical lung? She's not herself
today, now more than ever before a yellow, aleatoric
Vache Qui Rit coffee cup with Supérieure en Poids
et Qualité written in caps. Leap a decade. It's prophetic.
Bless the multiple aliases of our godbot who tracks
everything we are/are not. Better the light-thick husk
of a digital blink to fling the canon forward. She begs
unity and scales tiers foreclosed by torpor--casts bits,
scraps, arcs, peaks, pits, slits, knobs, globs, coils and slurs
filched from the skinned seal of Solomon with branded
sardonyx, kenosis, suavity and attention deficit disorder.

In listserves, she is initiated into the new 4G illuminati.
Her robo-sensitive, ganglionic eyes begin adamic naming:
botnet, botherd, ibot, verbot, cleverbot, twitterbot,
infobot, shopbot, votebot, pricebot, botmaster; i.e.,
the renaissance bot (black, blue, white and grey hat
hackers), as well as dosbot with supplied password
against plaintext strings of cryptographic hash such
as MD5 and SHA-1, salted for tight security. Bleakly
stirred by confession,  naming has edified her philtrum
as a godbot's amnesia--her hair, forehead, eyebrows,
eyelashes, eyes, nose, ears, cheeks, mouth, lips, temple,
teeth, skin and chin emote prequels. Divination faces
apophenia ogled by the return of a updated replicant
eating raw oysters and boiled dog, coiffed with glossy
red lips and the doom-eager eyes of no fixed abode.





Threnody of Reach

The desert is no longer a landscape, it is pure form
produced by the abstraction of all others.
--Jean Baudrillard

Fires of stone and sedge, dried below a mantle
of basalt. Walls of pink clay shaped like teeth
clenched on bone. Mineral stained arcs high-
striped in cracks. Petrified sand dunes layered
in conical rings. Evapotranspiration in a matrix
of orange runoff. Rainshadow tundra littered
with red spiked prickly pears. Xerocoles stalking
the 1875 fennec fox painting, Die Gartenlaube.
Moloch, the thorny devil lizard, uncalcified with
spiny false head. The arroyo rape of hydrogen
with is carcass gliding like tumbleweed. The
Ecclesiastical Latin of abandon with Aeolian ergs
of no one. Bedrock outcrops, fluvial deposits
and vertebrae in barchan seifs. Veins of gypsum
in the silts of Blue Anchor. The colorless grey
of impurity. A collapsed shack. A tin shed. A head
frame and ore bin below Williams's cylindrical
tree. Shallow, low-bottom gradient pit encrusted
with salt. Last image in hot, parted air. Leguminous
plants which extract nitrogen, rot in red beams
of a fossil veil. The phobic leitmotiv of a tracking
shot's vulture, scores its dung beetle. Lethal, latent
and lacteal suicide motels caked in hyper-neon
light. Transurbanistic veins of freeway twist radical
lack to a nowhere of near. The pastel blue, mauve
and lilac of crystalline flora, cracking through
tarmac. The sign says threnody of reach on sale. 
Curio of rarefied surplus. Just cash. Small bills. 

© Daniel Y. Harris 2013