Hero Worship by Jay Gao

Hero Worship

I wake to stay in bed again, decide
every minor error of mine will remain broken in its wildness.
Nights of loss now end peacefully and rarely with restless
sediment. Beyond doubt, I no longer feel alone.
Update on security incident is the subject of these siren emails;
so it seems ghosts keep trying to hack the university’s global
trade routes. I dream about our sacred technicians haunting around
the anxious clock. Deep breathing. Remain
vigilant. I remind myself I am the translation machine. Excavated,
I am multiplying. In the morning, it must have snowed
even if I did not witness it.
This inert world seemed so buried with an off-white energy
yet to be exploited, and I made a gambit to get my body out of there,
a homecoming in disguise, my old return. Jupiter, Saturn,
Mercury aligned a few weeks ago without me even knowing.
Yet I could still perceive it. I think I slept right through it,
like a dress rehearsal before death.
No matter how many rooms
I gift my heroic molecules, they refuse to fall in line,
to deterritorialise. I will be honest, I am excited to know what aporias
you will be planning soon, I praise our tenantless sun.
This year, I resolve to be both at home and not,
wet with words, my fingers within language
then doing without.
One childhood ambition was to project myself way into the past,
to be consoled only by classical bodies.
I always wanted to end by walking backwards, trace
slower circles in my back garden; in the distance,
beyond the steel mountains, I hear a train slip back into
the platform of its avant-garde station with a click, that snap of setting
a pen’s cap back on. The hands of the train are lifted
straight up as if to say: O.K. You got me. I admit it,
I yield my tempo. So just let me surrender
over all my worlded goods to you.