Black Medicine

(This poem previously appeared in oddball magazine on July 5, 2023.)

digital skin walkers back
              from the brink of extinction.
AI-generated Trickster virus
downloading crowdsourced
              personal data directly
              into cranium chips.
Virtual reality handshake
              agreements
between remote machines.
Fire wall trojan horses,
wait, bottom line like Weyland
              Corp cops tweaked
              on hard-wired neural implants and jack juice …
{Define, please}: ___
{definition: a cocktail of tar sands,
              caffeine drips and cyber
                            buffalo cum.}
Red terminal neon, poison night,
a soot that weighs down everything
              with the gravity of sin.
Any other city, and we’d both
              have fewer exit wounds.