POEM FOR SNOWDEN #8: COLLIS

Redacted

Stuck again we came up with something else

Tried gluing the cardboard ends of worlds

To our heads and backs like

The defensive plates and spikes

Of dinosaurs we weren’t but were becoming

Or drove out west like a movie we remember

Where girls feet rest on the dash

Window prism light listening to electric chatter

And music seems part of the sunny world

That is escaping last air from a thought balloon

The gentle breeze backyard backdrop

Of evergreen trees allows a long strand of

Web the faintest visibility floating like

This will be the last word spoken or

Overheard no this will—Kalamazoo

But then the Internet didn’t care anymore

Though it went on recording every gentle

Key caress and whoever we were outside information

We stood together and with our chemicals

And held death a little closer to our whispering lips

When we text it is barely the memory of bird song

There might be some data or DNA left somewhere

But with no readers who cares what bugs

Are expressing remnants of after images and holes

This whistle’s blown and we are unplugged for good

—Stephen Collis

Stephen Collis is an award winning poet and professor of contemporary literature at Simon Fraser University. His poetry books include Anarchive (New Star 2005), The Commons (Talon Books 2008), On the Material (Talon Books 2010—awarded the BC Book Prize for Poetry), and To the Barricades (Talon Books 2013). He has also written two books of criticism, including Phyllis Webb and the Common Good (Talon Books 2007), and a novel, The Red Album (BookThug 2013). His collection of essays on the Occupy movement, Dispatches from the Occupation (Talon Books 2012), is a philosophical meditation on activist tactics, social movements, and change.

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