dormammu ive come 2 bargain by Liam Burke

i could just stay here

gather green trichomes

let inertia have its way

collate colonies of moss

mash every button

to escape the command-

grab of coming of age

i have many tokens to barter

lipsnot mouse skulls

yellow plastic my least favourite

action figure pages stuck

together at the back of the magazine

o do i have to gro up

renounce jewl cases

and card stock comics

smokey bureaus

can i stay a child

sick against the glo

of the cathode ray

close enough to feel

the static pull me

apart scatter my

electrons so i see every

phosphor dot every

dialogue tree every

neural clique

flatten and collapse

my whole timeline

against this moment

against this light this

light this light this light

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Liam Burke (@liamjmburke) lives in Ottawa, Canada, on unceded Algonquin Anishinaabe land. He is most recently the co-author of 'machine dreams' with natalie hanna (collusion books, 2021) and ‘Orbital Cultivation’ with Manahil Bandukwala (2x4, forthcoming). His work has most recently appeared in Savant-Garde, the Jupiter Review, and long con magazine.”