To be published in the winter solstice 2026 issue of The Sun Thief.

Left Bank Loki

Loki sees the best minds of his generation
complain about the WiFi. From this link he learns
that in the cloud of unknowing improv works best.

But Loki can’t seem to make any routine work now, knowing
the oceans slosh plastic into fish hearts. A real buzzkill.
Bruises.  Bruises.
And these jeremiads are not a good fit
for us, thank you for letting us read them
and hope you place them elsewhere. A message without messenger.

At the Café de Flore, Loki tries more of this routine:
We live at the fault line. We live in principalities
of product placements of what a garden like Eden surely needs.  
We hide how they who ate the fruit 
of the knowledge of good and evil
have developed an online service for apples. Drone dropped.
Bottled water from Mímisbrunnr. Set up monthly delivery.
All gone.  Not a laugh in the crowd.

In Denver he knit a black turtleneck and soaked it with absinth.
(He smoked Gauloises, shredding his throat instantly. Out on Hiway
61 with the SF Beat boys. He left Oslo for Bodh Gaya, as though 
the zeitgeist, as its very self, could be hoodwinked.)
In Oaxaca he sang Songs of Innocence, accompanying himself
on a harmonium. You can’t laugh at his hunger to make the team. 

Loki was born to poke holes in convention and save souls.
Loki digs these very holes in the Big Sur sand dunes.
And while eternity is overrated, it’s Loki we’re talking about, huh?
Come on, simple gratitude gives him five stars.

He’s crying again in the wilderness, in the uber dry suffocation 
of an entangled samsara. His provision, though, is out of network.
He cries an illness into that desperate wind of clickbait and confession.

Therefore, Loki will end this life loving a list that never included him,
but Loki’s lived long enough to learn love outlasts the list.
Or so his practice™ suggests.

All gone.
But in that gap there is a god
with flying shoes. A singer who sings between the notes.
Music algorithms aren’t really that odd anymore, given
how we used to let autofill run the cars off into the quarry.
The domed observatory in the thin grey laptop counts the stars
as the purple round Packard roars down the hill
to drugs, and jazz nite, and to a pure hedonism
that was gone forever when USENET was birthed.

Loki has an idea. Let’s rip the red jacket off that
stoned boy with the hawk’s nose at Cardinal Lemoine Metro station.
Remember the sweet smell of Grove Press. Loki thinks
of a set up with Grove Press as the payoff.

He asks A.I.  There is infinite emptiness in the request.
Chain smoking in every decade of the last century, Loki
has a nasty cough in this one. He googles cause and effect.

In conclusion, the winner gets the paycheck.
Endorse the permanent silence with your signature
you did not make and cannot hear. Just wait, the silence is near.

You want Loki to hush? Exactly.

Loki and his bro Hermes and his cousin Kandinsky 
carry this noise of absent prayer to its logical end.
The noise left out of our songs. The noise that will be gone
before you know it.

There’s a silence from scarcity.
It differs from the silence of letting go.
The history that knows the difference 
and could save us has a gatekeeper.
I can’t remember the password, can you?

Loki’s lived his life trying to shut up.
Loki’s poems are meant to be the sound of him shutting up.
But he can’t make the beatniks, asleep in the ditch, hear
how courageous his hilarious attack on digital primacy is.

They are sleeping off another wild night
on the slick and soiled sheets in Hotel Rachou’s
room for business guests (printers, ketamine). A good WiFi.