Psychic Numbing

A man ejaculates into a cup in a room 
where none of the cabinets have handles. Smooth

odorless units spring back with the slightest pressure. 
He flips through images of breasts wrapped in leather

and buckles. Afterward, separates act from state 
from performance from love with absolute certainty.

Ashes in a glass ashtray. Death in pixels 
across the algorithm. For a whole year

the strawberry crop tastes of garlic and we pretend 
we’re not all strangers but we are, and we are

complicit. Due to a high volume of atrocity, 
Psychic Numbing is the term coined to define the 20th century

human brain and its inability to absorb a death toll 
greater than three. Psychologists have suggested for some time

the heart and the mind are not to be considered 
kindred. The authorities send ships up the river

to care for the sick and collect bodies and revenue 
and accolades. There is nothing but luxury

in the generosity of language. The Episcopalians in DC 
condemn apartheid. Tomorrow, the Catholics. We look on

as infrastructure starts to crumble; meat-eating birds roam city skies 
in packs stealing matryoshka dolls from little girls’ hands,

downing hotdogs in one sustained gulp. 
Somewhere someone is working

on a mathematical principle that makes logic  
the bifurcation of mother from child; the benevolence

of mother to mother illogic while mother 
mutates to child again in a single generation;

as if there is a way this cleaving could be subtracted 
from sentiment and structurally understood

by name, definition, and made searchable.
With this kind of precision, we update

PowerPoints exacting timelines for when we stop 
guarding against the irrelevance

of feeling. In this model: a set of equations 
for the splintering of consciousness. Or so reasoned Descartes

who wasn’t around when Breughel painted
both The (Little) or The (Great) Tower of Babel.

At the Vatican, the Pope condemns apartheid, 
but falls short of believing that

breaking a single language into many 
was punishment for the wicked—it was

what required us to learn to love each other without words. 
A man with desirable genetics jerks off into a cup

and makes a baby, heads back to the office 
and plots complex points on translucent paper

that measures the approximate value of a single life lost 
in events of mass casualty. Suggests the payment structure

adjusted for inflation, that will be approved in a court of law 
and paid out responsibly. He goes home and makes

peanut butter sandwiches on whole wheat bread 
in a vast, sterile kitchen, orders sugar spoons from IKEA.  

He never has any children he holds. In a stroke of luck
scientists discover black holes create stars.

They are spit out on the backside into 
an unknown frontier we can't quite grasp, but we try

to name with our inadequate language 
and end up with hyphenated numbers

that fail. In a lecture on YouTube 
Robert Hass says, Is it not the duty of the poet to root

the tenderness of tenderness? I think 
he's talking about grief. My best friend floats

the concept of radical love. We debate  
our adolescent obsessions with violence

that have mutated over the years. If the human 
mind can hold on to the proposition of goodness

and still murder animals for sport, what then?