Turing’s Time Machine

The ticker tapes have run out,
swallowing ones and zeroes,
while from a perfect and pink aporia
dangles the hell’s end of a cigarette
that hisses goodbye, goodbye dear,
goodbye to all that in an ink blot.

I’m crossing old circuits.
Secret and serendipitous, but to the naked
eye, merely a site to hack a beery slash
in the navv hours… Supposed utopia
forsaken, the flip side
of a fast one—a fist, or life.

The graffiti curates obscenity
in water closets. The toes tap
epistles in a whore’s code.
The living history of silence
is counted in the vibratory instants
between chapel bells.

I’m held under suspension
bridges, holding breaths portentous
as gothic fog. I’m standing aside-eyed
at love, hovering around the urinals,
attuned to the signals: those fleeting gazes gone
to the eye-white narcissi of the neon—

And in a flash, I see men safe
in the palm of my hand,
and all our causeways come undone.
And in the bar, we text our muscled
apparitions while our want is numbered:
one more for the night, and then we swallow

the zero hour.