I keep throwing my phone at pigeons
expecting a little bounce, and the stars

that mean I’ve caught them. If not that,
I’m gripping it like a piton
driven into the sheer cliff of a mountain

of information, the clouds

a drifting universe below me,
as I hold on for dear life. At dinner,

this greatness takes the shape of two minds,
one helping out with trivia.

My partner and I place ourselves, screen up,
on the table, and conversation is an even split
as the night’s text

threads fill like helium balloons.

Where there are two of us,
there are actually six, at least.

Like it or not, I am among this Over-Soul
Emerson always wished for,
and it sounds like      
                            the Jurassic Park theme
played on an elementary school recorder.

The collective conscious
is in my right pocket, and it’s a clubbed

foot stepping through a cloud,

and nobody
is happy about falling,
until we see we
actually fall forward.

***

Paperless diary
between which flowers are
pressed voice pressed
between silences
Everyone is everyone’s
biographer We illuminate
in a screen’s blink mock
shutter speed
unprecedented

***

I am not one to be tricked
so easily. Magicians get a pass.
I look up at the sky
as hands move below
like rats on train tracks.

God could be jobless
or a magician’s left hand,
until my phone
lights up, a little breath
of text on screen,
and I am convinced
the clouds are charged
with something beyond
my intellect, and someone
somewhere is close
to mapping it.

I was digging around
in my unemployed
friend’s insides, after weeks
of not speaking, skittering
inside their poem. And as if
they could feel the cursor
drag water over their letters,
keys grafting branches,
asked me how I ended up
in my current position,
the screen a blossom of
light, conscious.