By Michael Joyce

Sleep like babies’, the undifferentiated terror and dull pain
of becoming once again upon them, unutterable bone ache
as muscles stretch into some new being, Bachelard’s auberge
à fantômes, rooms swept clean each morning as they resume
themselves, shadowless, bereft beneath the thin cover of
gray overcast, “à la base, le zombi est un mort qui marche,”
basically a zombie is walking death, says the online bestiary
propagated by children in a game world, presided over
by an elf, what could they know of growing into this
restlessness? how lovers fall from a preternatural embrace
into dream semblances of themselves, mewling once again
like astronauts tethered to the tumbling apparatus circling
the blue planet from which they come and which seems
at this distance Verlaine’s moon of masks and Bergamasks
the bed a costume ball in which we play ourselves at last

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Michael Joyce’s fifteen books and several digital works—most recently the poems “Light in its Common Place,” from Broadstone Books, 2020—span a career as novelist, poet, critic, theorist, digital literature pioneer, and multimedia artist.

Originally appeared in NOR 2