Swirling violins viola & cello
repeating symmetries lifting, the room.
This is where hyper-quantization

comes in, a secret ideology
invading your head till
you feel hacked, everything

being on the grid. A yellow streetlight
signifying memory
opening like a mirror

when it gives the impression
of expanding space. And the line keeps
advancing, in riot gear now

in this direction. Today, we’re moving
along an axis darkly
in ‘great broken rings,’ like swans.


Studies show the mind depends
on the sea
for nourishment.
                        Weighed,
what’s inaccessible on a second read
bursts out like champagne
but equaling the loss
of potential gains. Now

offering up the sheen of experience,
memories in cut glass.

     What it is today & the outdoors
like a screen and the blue
butterfly just a brief projection
of visible light.
                   A spray of blood
on thorns enacts the
counterfeit of miracle. Let’s say
it was too late, what leaked
out of the accounts. We

were always not speaking. Next.
In place of / lyrical moments.
And how I knew it had turned.

Let’s say the world, say a world then.
Not a world narrow as a binary
with us always at its top…OK,

but maybe dolphins will succeed
where we have failed.


Fireworks of euphoria, and a sharp corner
where the tension is—
The fluidity of surface, like wind
or like a white noise of outside notes…

OK it’s fine then, and profitable,
this celebration of agelessness
albeit a bit risky, to deny (or disclose)
your real net worth, though

it was my wish to hit the right key…O,
& the context of the soul is another thing,
it fits the forecast
of bitter unhappy weather

in a variable length of time.
Too short to celebrate the few victories
we do get, we allow
ourselves to feel jubilant

until the old complacency sets in
and we wake in a world where
all of our problems are solved but
in a broken system, with only two ways out…


David Wyman’s second poetry collection, Violet Ideologies, was published in 2020 by Kelsay Books. His first book Proletariat Sunrise, also published by Kelsay Books, came out in 2017. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Squawk Back, Blazing Stadium, BlazeVOX, Dissident Voice, Zombie Logic Review, Clockwise Cat, Picaroon Poetry, Tuck Magazine and S/WORD among other publications.