The Future Price of Love

Go ask the boys in mergers and acquisitions,
ask them who they’re holding out for
in the takeover battle between desire and technology.
Ask them to give you a future price on love.

What do you mean by home?
That over-furnished earthbound hovel
where obsolete machines
weep their rusty sepia dreams? Oh please.

I was never one for breakfast, or families.
My Sundays were never lugubrious with roasts.
Instead I haunted empty libraries, long deserted avenues
of wisdom and incidental sadnesses.

All that luxuriant loneliness, those long histories of haunting,
I never wanted the things everyone else did,
preferred hotels to houses, strangers to friends.
Kisses and cars meant little to me, or only in passing.

It’s not my war, this war between desire and technology,
since desire is my technology.
Though I’m fucked if I know the difference
between a technology and an epistemology.

Perhaps love, like a fork, is both. Language and cutlery
hide in the warm darkness of the mouth.
I once made a promise as sharp as a prison knife.
Yes, I killed a man, and I did my time.

I am an undercover mercenary for a failed state. I am a fugitive suicide.
No, that’s not true, I am a compulsive liar
who always dreamed of being a lone assassin,
a murderer of memories, a secret agent for the state of forgetting.

Go ask the boys in mergers and acquisitions,
What do you mean by home?
I was never one for breakfast, or families,
all that luxuriant loneliness, those long histories of haunting.

It’s not my war, this war between desire and technology,
perhaps love, like a fork, is both.
I am an undercover mercenary for a failed state. I am a fugitive suicide.
Go ask the boys in mergers and acquisitions.

Ask them to give you a future price on love.