Dark Matter
A mass of ganglia and volts, alive inside such goop, where any random rub upon its rimpled globes might send a static crackle down the spine. Like that small blue lightning which leaps from fingers run swiftly over fur upon the backs of cats. No black or white, gray matter zaps its wrinkles into high-def plasma. Again, the universe is duped—is duplicated. Little gaps that body out our thoughts, O chasms myelinated where the meaning’s made; a soul construed from dendritic orbs and electron sauce, a sensorium that blooms from no known origin. Connections pruned until the whole thing’s pruney, its wherewithal like flashes in a pan that’s omega’d by so much fishy fat, each seeming fact hexed into being by software melting like a Dalí clock. You pass the “I am not a robot” test, then swagger on with clicks and scrolls, some faux dot blinking in the maze. Auguries the algorithm’s reading. Aware of your own consciousness at times, a living presence in a dim-lit room or a fleeting premonition of someone vaguely staring at you; but not—but not the messy jester-box from which your dark unwombs.
Will Cordeiro has work published or forthcoming in 32 Poems, AGNI, Bennington Review, Copper Nickel, Pleiades, and The Threepenny Review. Will won the 2019 Able Muse Book Award for a poetry collection, Trap Street (Able Muse, 2021). Will is also author of a fiction collection, Whispering Gallery (DUMBO Press, forthcoming 2024) and coauthor of Experimental Writing: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury, 2024). Will coedits Eggtooth Editions and lives in Guadalajara, Mexico.