Two Poems by Joe Milazzo

Interocitor Rock

I vote we live
hereafter
in a world of nightmare appliances

refrigerators that are actual lungs
if you care to assuage
your guests’ thirst
to decock your elbow
and rifle your arm through
epistemologies of pleurisy is
your only choice

a theocracy of thermostats
parallelizing neutrophils
into thick gradients

networks of smart carbuncles
assembling through-hole
circuitry you can desolder
without fiddling with
wicks and braids
thereby connoting a self-attention
worse than masturbation

under the watching
over of this éminence grise
ectoplasm stabilizes into a kind of latex
by law and catechism alike
we each powder every extremity
with pulverized chips
of pigments explicitly leaden
otherwise these mucus-colored protections
are not so easily bonded

where tumors take to skimming
the ocean is teflon
the forest an oscilloscope
the sun a cursor

a phosphor implacable
neither dawning nor setting
only reinforcing
content to feed strobing
monochromes from
my right to your left
your left to my right

Pump and Dump

how insufferable hilarity has become
familiar and furrowed with a shorthand balding
trying kindly to evoke a stock rebuke

this stubble of a human being illustrates
a vasectomized open-mindedness
dissonantly squinting as if to say an itch
strewn with the synonymous trawls
blurred backgrounds of gold for the umpteenth time

the hell of a healthy suckage is in the titular metadata
overrunning satire opinions reverse into introspection

after a weirder back-and-forth ignoring dawns on friends
whose friends are competing versions of a wreck
who looks a lot like a great point which has no byline

what a visage feels about blocked queries
still trembles intently while every few seconds
a sleuth’s unironic touch sources actual power
from the clash of sadness and randomness