Pinout by Uche Ogbuji | Really System: Issue Eleven

Pinout

Uche Ogbuji

View outside from the ascent.

Neat clip of black leads
Between white that mocks green,
Industrial green conductors from afar;
But this is spark-jump-off-point,
Split potential mid-midwest;
The volt rail lazy with its creep
With grey, ghost-chromed cars.

Capacitor silos stapled down level,
No rakish tilt to mad angles
As throughout the sprawl-spare West;
Oh this nervous itch and raised hair
At organic mass pressed bulging
Against a sudden grid of white-flaked
Macabre reminder of skin cells,
While leopard cold probes stubbornly
At its loathsome thrill of high notice,
This chiseling drone of turboprop.

The slate and white and dirty white
And thick lichen green of raised
Polygons in bold convex hull
Or strapped in fractal maze retreat,
Brackets tones in maculate electroplate,
In ribbons and flat-beaten panels,
From grime room supine under cumulus,
Doped, gassed white in layers,
Breaching suddenly upon the lake
With its LCD grey
And sharded, plate glass fringe
And rarefied echo of copper green,
All pretending to a blue that doesn't cut ice
With any skipped beat of wary sun.

Down in those toy junctions
Currency evades the naked eye,
Pushing the charged hole of comity
From warm hearth to warm hearth;
At this remove struck by induction
I rise in dry cell battery of the cabin
And the tongue tickle indulges me, lingering
As I sit pushed towards pinout.

Uche Ogbuji born in Calabar, Nigeria, lived in Egypt, England and elsewhere before settling near Boulder, Colorado. A computer engineer and entrepreneur by trade, his poetry is published worldwide, and his chapbook, Ndewo, Colorado won Colorado Book and Westword awards. A selection of his poems was featured in the Best New African Poets 2015 anthology. Find him online at http://uche.ogbuji.net/.

ISSUE ELEVEN: Yes, Sell My Art | next poem →