Charles Bernstein, How I Became Pre-Human

When You Uplift The Transparent Eyeball, Make Sure To Bring Mascara, image by Daniel Y. Harris

How I Became Pre-Human

T-

he

s-

a-

nd att-

racts

jus-

t

abo-

ut m-

ore than

any gi-

rl o-

r b-

oy c-

oul-

d dream

On the l-

one shore

af-

ter the apoca-

lyp-

se.

Vans r-

ace ’r-

ou-

n-

d with bracing

Theatrics

a-

nd I sit back

and thi-

nk about lost ri-

verbeds where I buried

My th-

ough-

ts before th-

e storm began

or is it

begun

or maybe it

nev-

er

Rea-

l-

l-

y happened and there is just this beach,

this o-

cean

of regret,

this

Mascaraed sky.

I

reach out

to you

every day

but

I know it’s

too late.

The anthropocene

is the

delusion of a

bathetic interloper

scratching

Obscene slogans

on the melting ice.

--Charles Bernstein 

Charles Bernstein's Pitch of Poetry will be out this Spring form University of Chicago Press. His most recent collection of poems is Recalculating, also from Chicago. He teaches at the University of Pennsylvania. More info at EPC http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/bernstein