BROWSE Columns
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In a Station of the Hyperbolic Metro
(Smells and sights blur into pink lights and cigarettes/
Forms materialize, a crowd of people/
Eyes glow, a metallic halo, revolving heat/
Apparitions and faces and crowds and the blackness of a bough/
Vampires, Vadātājs, Vrykolakas, Viruñas corral/
Funky-smelling seats and beats by DJs mixing ceremonial/
Tofu simmers, broth red and fermented, silence and soup/
Saxophones plaster onto papyrus as reeds drip with a riffer’s spit/
Feeling ho-hum about a halloo from the gorge of a seraphic centauress/
Verisimilitudes of verities vivaciously vary in vicarious vaults [rainbows!]/
Amateur rappers light up mics in subway cars, waving arms/
It’s mad lit here and everyone who doesn’t think so is a square/
Vain mockeries of idols and gods as positivists party to music composed by Adorno/
Visceral Realists and Symbolists disagree but get ass-blasted by absinthe in unison/
And the colorful ideologies in books smash into glass and objectivity/
Philip Glass plays synths as Princess Shikishi contemplates Spring and Ashura/
People fret about passports in their pockets as every country here is converged/
Multiplicities in spacetime spread, all trembling on one of Rainbow Fish’s scales/
Dialectics consume one’s thought and yet one cannot get rid of mythical imagery/
Chimeras are far too fun and meshing them with perfumes and tastes makes for la dolce vita/
Ruling classes have taken pleasures into their paradigm, so it’s best to be ascetic in a metro/
Play with Restoration, Alteration, Alchemy, Fists, Shouts, your mods based around Requiem/
Maybe then, as the apocalypse coalesces into a single point in history,
Will we have fun getting screwed over in makeshift bunkers steeled for fallout/
Every Thai and Indian spice has been sprinkled onto the best alfredo pasta/
Laying on each subway seat are verses torn from a lost Provençal romance/
And as the salad of images tosses around, the poet realizes the possibilities of poetry/
Can youthful preoccupations under neuroplasticity ever be redeemed in a single image?/
These mini cyborgs are marvels of human engineering/
Gannet's clamor, sea-fowls, loudness for me is wealthy and wine-flushed/
And the albatross that shrugs off pirates can’t soar, stuck in the metro/
A train in the sky mesmerizes ignorers of climate change/
Bunkers have lift off; these tiny soil-planets levitate from earth
As gravitational tech pulls every screen around them/
Those who deem themselves radical can’t pull away from everything that is bourgeois/
People are too enchanting, lit up in a club, where all is false and glamorous/
One shouldn’t be too forgiving, in case artist and subject are confused as the same/
At once the greatest artist and the worst, stuck in one’s own aesthetic ideology/
At once the greatest human and business person, with the charm and dollars to prove it/
And one wonders why all the names of merchants have been lost to history/
Mental play is objectively the greatest thing, if greatness is even necessary/
Villagers and workers unite in fruitful conversations about otherworldly pastorals/
These are the things one should live for and yet doesn’t, getting drunk too often/
And the creators who never live for irony finally assemble some crazy shit/
Here they are, producing baby unicorns, mermaids, and fairies sprouting from gardens in play/
Cute, interesting, zany, poofing and becoming sublime ideologies by force of law/
And riverside rollickers in leather jackets nod at anything that would increase their cool/
Woolf and García Villa shake their heads; more noble thoughts bubble from their brains/
Whirlwinds in the subway car as it floats in the sky, and the abstractions merge into
A thing at once a perfume, an image, a scent, a taste, a note)
Tresses, ties, coattails, dresses;
Leaves flurry around a fallen ponderosa.
Efren Laya Cruzada is a poet who was born in the Philippines and raised in the small town of Alice, Texas. He studied English and American Literature and Creative Writing at New York University. He is the author of Grand Flood: a poem. His poems have been published in many journals, most recently in The Ekphrastic Review, The Tiger Moth Review, Discretionary Love, and Tiny Seed Literary Journal. He now resides in Austin, Texas. You can find more of his work at efrenlayacruzada.com.
