Self-portrait as a Globalist
K. Alex Mills
This dark chocolate from only
Papua New Guinea tastes
nothing like a Diet Coke or
even the fantasy a Diet Coke
had to be something more.
Actually it would politely
be called “earthy” I guess
somebody could have added
soil or forgotten to wash it but I
could not explain the difference.
I am not wearing the clothes I
summoned from the clouds via
my invocation of credit.
In the catalog they were perfect
but two days later now they have
become a thin polyester frock.
They make their home away in
my closet until I evict them un-
worn back where they came from.
So many things come to me
when I am sleeping or awake
and in the shower or anywhere
carried across the air and
over the ground by a network
of hands I will never shake and
promptly converging on me.
I do not want them anymore.
I have no room for them now,
their rough paper wrapping coated
with the journey-dust leftovers
of one hundred human souls
left as a toy for my cats.
K. Alex Mills spent years at university getting a Ph.D. in Computer Science. Now, he is paid to spend most of his time behind a computer screen, coaxing pieces of code into doing his bidding. This task requires little in the way of human language, so he writes poetry as a way of spending his leftover words. His work has previously appeared at Better than Starbucks.