Stephen Kampa
—
Vectors
Less the shit-spurts or piss-floods of pure terror, crotch-cloth
darkening in brisk, eccentric, tectonically edged
blots like an animated
epidemiology
map that marks, in real time, the spread of an infectious
disease, and more the insistent low-grade tooth-grinding
of moderate, strangely un-
treatable anxiety,
the probative hollowed-out feeling of having found
cavities one can’t brush away: the dread we had was
omnipresent, like clothes in
civilized society.
Our vectors of concern, definite yet infinite,
radiated from our chests like steel spokes from the steel
hub of an immoveable
wheel, chaotic as the stays
and struts crisscrossing an amateur’s summer garden;
follow any vector, and you would dead-end at some
all-too-imaginable,
amply televisable
fear: we might nuke ourselves, Crackberries gave us cancer,
our coupes were idly pulling down the sky one stoplight
at a time. What would happen
when, as per our worst sci-fi
fantasies, we could finally implant motherboards,
wires, widgets, you name it, directly into our brains
and hear in ultraviolet?
Download a scent? Cyber-tweak
on cyber-crank? Hence, the steel vectors radiating
from our chests: we looked like voodoo dolls, like overworked
pincushions. Ice kept melting
in polar caps and whiskey
glasses both. We let all the waves—radio, micro-,
Bluetooth, WiFi—knead and numb our innards. Irony:
we could never worry long
enough in one direction
to be useful. Everything was fast, everything was
convenient, everything was done before we knew it.
We envied the butterflies:
through their bodies, the one pin.
Stephen Kampa is the author of three collections of poetry: Articulate as Rain, Bachelor Pad and Cracks in the Invisible. His work has also appeared in Best American Poetry 2018 and Together in a Sudden Strangeness: America's Poets Respond to the Pandemic. He teaches at Flagler College. Currently, he is the writer in residence at the Amy Clampitt House.
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