***
I was a thought and I wanted
to inhabit
physical form
embodied I think it’s called
the diffraction of possible lives
despair or transcendence
highly encrypted
radiation
***
trash is my copilot
my atmospheric sick
everyday is the reptile
brain
spun out in the slick dream
shades glimmering through a room full of silhouettes
today’s forecast is for more
kaleidoscopic oil in the street
the planetary scale of the void who eats the world
a brutal joke
ominous chanting
the trick of this place
my unlacing
mind’s incongruent
simulacra
but why haven’t you saved me
the secret answer is
***
therefore
life must be a simulation
I guess
iterating through frog dna astral projection
***
I cultivate
my avatar fetish
in the
must
generate
shimmer
I run straight ahead
like I could catch up all the minutes I left behind
and maybe that will be finally spring there
instead
I drink an elixir filled with flies and expire
wake up in capital
a rogue emulation
a crystalline blood
compelled to earn
efficient treasure
that which has been named
what and by whom
symbolization absolutely and only
a spinning through the phoneme
into the ontic
into the phoneme
into the ontic
our metaphysic
we
each
fragmented
monads
all the days I could’ve seen instead
how best to avoid the abyss
I’d like to be remembered for the plants I placed and the flowers I carried there
***
heavy as time
now I’m the garbage
now I’m the mist
—
“avatar fetish” and “generate shimmer” are from Immediacy
“paranoid cartographers” is from Anti Oculus
“rogue emulation" is from Citizen Sleeper
“how best to avoid the abyss” is from Black Sails
Robert Balun is a Lecturer in the Program in Writing and Rhetoric at Stony Brook University, and a PhD Candidate in English. He is the author of the poetry collections Acid Western (The Operating System) and Traces (Ursus Americanus Press). His poems have appeared in American Poetry Journal, Reality Beach, Powder Keg, TAGVVERK, Tammy, Prelude, Barrow Street, Apogee, Cosmonauts Avenue, and others. His first collection of scholarship, Metaphysics of the Anthropocene: Notes Towards An Ethics of Thinking and Making, is forthcoming from Routledge in 2026.