Self Portrait as Tick

The Farmer Daydreams in 2175

In the assigned lowlands where I keep

moss & peat meant for dinner, where I steward

bark & birch, nudge their circuits & their wires

into something like dirt, dark

as tongue in loam I taste their pixels, wheeze

their simulated scent, hug

the bark-printed tower, I give thanks

to the graphic card & all these rude

practices I follow as a farmer rotoscoped

over artificial matrix, mean & mote I complete

in well-worn orbit a tradition

by latest update patched

& diligent as the beaver’s

face who appears before

my own in idle requiem, extinct

legend I’ve heard about, kept once upon

video, not surveillance like the video

I plow under but enjoyment:

the beast scrolled through

by my ancestors, the paddle tail

cooed over back when there were minerals

for phones, the beaver captured in a dry & lacquered

hallway, no doubt half-satisfied half-fried

by PineSol in the sinuses, stacks

plush animals, no, piles plush

in cartoon forms, motion rote

as progress bar, at least a minute

where he tooths a glut of felt

with plastic eyes into a dam, no,

the polyester ghost

of a dam, while the animal’s unseen

             domesticators

laugh & laugh, frame shot low

over their clean-socked

feet, decapitating their silken basketball shorts

that step through the beaver’s best if pointless

effort which still demands itself, desire

that insists itself recognized through

some ordered rows, no different than the desire

of the life that works except this one doesn’t