dear smart city telecom of celebration, florida

You heard I came up lacking
the equipment to be critical of BOGO
propositions,
just thrilled to be alive
as spiders in the Long John Silver’s
painted black.

I’ve done as love and angel dust requires
to my eyes.

Took feedings at the horn unholstered from
a thigh of only minerals that drift
on daiquirimachinelight.

That nourishment kept pace with my
confabulation
of the
names.

Names for every mall fern no one told me
to stop watering—
silk children
never clued into their spiritless
nature. Blossoming
through tabletops of food courts,
tremoloed
by undulating
concrete, yoked up in the winds
of permanence, inertia,

the palms spaced so, the interstitial IP-branded manhole covers…
Designed with
math too certain for the marsh.
The slumped forward face of me.

So I rent the truck, whipped cream
vodka brand ambassador
complicit in my nightclub
parking lot homicide,
I rent the truck to pull up on
the tracts
that would be datacenter.
Pull the fumes into my nostrils by the throat.

Swing set voices whistle through
the Caterpillars beached along the lot.

How much am I selling off to tell you that my language
was that language
and my food
smelled like particular food?

Names without much half-life in the actual sun.
It’s gotten so that leaves
and doves— that what it is
you signify invoking their government names—
has gone
and roused failed organs of a victimhood
I keep.

You’ve heard I’ve joined the night parade
of childmonks

who schlep around the U-Hauls of
your damaging ephemera.

—

from Issue 9 of new_sinews

—

Gabriel Palacios is the author of A Ten Peso Burial for Which Truth I Sign (Fonograf Editions, 2024) and Lunar Hilton Elegy (Kuhl House Poets, forthcoming 2026). Based in Tucson, Arizona, he creates songs and soundpoems as Spanish Trail Motel.