Artificial Light
by Peter Schwartz

me and you, we were fugitives

serenades in the flesh, minor magicians

practicing a new kind

 

of disappearance, we were

empiricists, black sheep, self-police

cannibals, we were

 

everything and nothing, the floating

variable in all this hunted dust

and half-perfected

 

distance, we were werewolves

without a moon, hourly guerillas

reinvented cynics, the

 

more-than-mortal, the culprits

and chain holders inside a whole

country of footsteps

 

we were the fishmongers

the cyclists, dive bombers and

survival artists, the iron

 

lungs outside the plaza, the faintly

friendly and perennially

jinxed, we were

 

the helmet-headed, the less-

than-mortal, the matadors, fortune

tellers and surrealists

 

we sat fireside, evolutionary

and powerfully flawed and utterly

naked, we were

 

strangers, funeral protectors

broken godheads, impressionists

tiny, tiny violinists

 

penny tourists, acrobats, swimmers

fly traps, toxicologists, the slow

but truly tattooed

 

we were androids, the heavily

infused migrating in pieces, the

sun watchers, if we were

 

guilty it was only of being

aerodynamic, of being living catalogs

parking lot astronauts

 

rabid mathematicians

verb connoisseurs

blank clairvoyants

 

of being flash and baggage

the adopted authors

of our own dying

 

spectrums, haunted stars

in a box of aching heirlooms

the men behind the

 

heaps, the brick and mortar

behind this question-

able martyrdom, we were

 

split devotionalists, the readers

and editors of corrupted skies

the fragile and angry

 

blind entertainers of a

thousand nightly siberias

defying us, defying

 

the very maps that created

them, we were farmers

bankers, cryptologists

 

pawned shots in the dark

peripheral mirages, mechanics

of meaning, dispatchers

 

guardians of that faulty valve

in our heart of hearts, the closest

thing to champions

 

this fractured allegory

will ever have in this primitive
primitive life

 

PETER SCHWARTZ’s poetry has been featured in The Columbia Review, DIAGRAM, and Opium Magazine. When not dreaming of literary conferences he’s writing or taking photos or thinking of who he should get for the next issue of DOZGPLOT, where he is art editor. His third chapbook, ghost diet, will be out at the end of 2009. Learn more about his work at www.sitrahahra.com.

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