Mike Bagwell

I Don’t Believe You (Gameshow Metaphysics)

The first game is there/not there.
The sky knows we are creatures
of trajectory and gives us choices.

The green door will take us through the species
to the other side. The crimson door is taken
away. It is a distant country, like everyone else.

They want you to go in now. You have thirty
seconds to think of something to fold. I can’t do
it for you, you will have to fold it for yourself.

The first game is there/not there, the only way
to keep the ego going. The current stage involves
reeling the sky back in with its telephone wires.

The last door is a weapon of mass destruction:
the sensation of touch, which is a character flaw,
which is one way of approaching the id.

I stared at the horizon
until it stared back.
It was not the horizon,

but my other self.
Congratulations! It signed
with its clouds. You are winning.

I Believe You Now (Cinema Metaphysics)

Most of us are actors anyway. The green dress,
the makeup smear in close-up, the father re-wombing
his children in the mantle—which is really a fast food

deep fryer—the Skypenis vs. Mechaskypenis,
the extras in awe and splendor.
We are just going to keep going

until the money runs out or our descriptions
for things desert us for better pay.
When I was pulled out of the river,

they took every possible precaution.
I was bound and gagged by Super 8
film strips. I was forced to read the cantos

in Russian. I was all artificial light.
How strange it is for people to hide fear
in such obvious places. The palm reader

said nothing except tender as hell
for a full half-hour. These were not
fake bullets, they were fake bodies.

If you poked a hole
all the way through me
you would see stars.

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From the author: This pair of ‘metaphysics’ poems are the only ones so structured in a full-length collection entitled The Skypenis Sagas: seven tercets focusing on fallible metaphysics and, like the remainder of the collection, interrogating our various patriarchal sky gods and their implicit incorporation in the foundations of meaning. This couplet of poems is about object permanence, the Lacanian mirror stage, the impossibility of the emergence of a self-present identity, the Derridean deconstructive ‘trace,’ the technological interruptions between ourselves and our perceptions, and the strange games and fictions we create simply to occupy the world. But as much as they revel in their pretensions, they’re also a lot of fun for me. Mechaskypenis is one of my favorite personas in the book—this poem is actually his first emergence, spawned by a compulsion towards a Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla cinematic image.

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