Cloud

excerpt: The Attack on Humanity
written on an Aspen parking permit

There must be sometimes more to place
Than mascara on a face,

Or a sleep mask that intrudes
Between our conscious interludes:

At the beach I am sunblind
To the rest of humankind

And the colored ocean I might pit
Against the sand’s constricted spit,

Putting faith in QED
Rather than an LCD,

In a déja-vu
Where only Comicon is true,

As what dependably is real
Is what the influencers reveal.

Rather than my own blind eye,
I put my confidence in AI,

In the Hollywood reality –
Not what I know, but what I see,

No image so illicit
That a fisheye lens can’t retrofit it,

IMAX landscapes in 3-D
Ever more illusory:

The college survey course created
Which movies move to when they’re dated;

Where the cinema of Todd A-O
Merges into manga Mayo,

The cosmic ritual of cosplay
Ripped apart by animé,

Where the way the spotlight slants
Matters more than circumstance,

And a scudding cirrus line of tsuris
Is what the inner landscape really is.

Here no pathetic fallacies
Or fallacious pathos frees

The cowardly portefeuille
With a laissez-faire trompe-l’oeil,

Pulling Loch Ness monsters out of ponds
Or colored handkerchiefs from wands:

Philosophy is no excuse
For logic out of Dr. Seuss,

For blaming galaxies of rain
On the presence of the brain

(As if the simple fact of pork
Were dependent on the fork),

Implying that the comic soul
Could be greater than the whole,

A world aghast to think that wit
Proposes to impose on it,

Not accepting that instead
The sky is just Above Our Head,

And the proper fallacy is to think
The world might vanish when we wink –

The opposite of course is true:
We exist because the sky is blue:

Humanity a masquerade,
A side effect of stellar shade,

The only drawing of the infinite
That the brushes of the air permit.

March 4th, 1995
March 8th, 2026, Kaiholu