Kafkaesque
Begins in Greenwich, England
Mildews as a verb
Refrains, i.e.
Never, never, never, never, never
And returns to an absolute ear
with its every no
An even longer line
at the end of every line
We were there implied in each erasure
like a hankering for
Whose you is mine?
But the time we dealt with
was human time
Orphic Data Lakes
The morning air enveloped precisely to mean good
morning — the scene of the crime — today slightly
overcast.
These are meant for us.
In our light-like separation, hear from ourselves
our static-curtained songs.
In Orphée, a radio unwraps from the netherworld A glass
of water illuminates the world.
Attention says the radio Silence
goes faster backwards The bird
sings with five fingers…
Which Cocteau first finds in a letter from Apollinaire.
Progress is air, all that is solid.
Of the Eiffel Tower, Apollinaire sees
a massive antenna.
Dear Jean,
pillars of salt infrastructure is code orphic data lakes.
I wish, today, I could tell you these
with the illocutionary force of fact.
World that is a world of rests.
Raymond de Borja reading: Kafkaesque
Raymond de Borja reading: Orphic Data Lakes
Raymond de Borja is the author of “they day daze” (High Chair, 2012). His recent work appears or is forthcoming in Big Other, Black Sun Lit, The Cambridge Literary Review, Jacket2, The Operating System, The White Review, and elsewhere.