dates and Smart Card eyes,
all yours, if you’ve got your number,
know your expiry date, all that.
One of them winks at me
(flashes on, on-off, off-off-on),
noise swallows signal in fumbled fellatio.
(I cross two fingers,
a binary precaution against hex,
effective as superconductor or simple superstition.)
Two poltergeists share a take-away. Old Soho always makes me nervous.
Brewer Street. A hiss from an alley: Mephistopheles opens his brown coat,
flashes me the lining (databased old invocations,
Magians lay ghosts—with diagrams), curses, and begins:
Blight an enemy?
Wither a harvest?
Barren a consort?
Debase an innocent?
Ruin a party . . . ?
For you, sir? No, sir? Reconsider, I beg you.
Just a little of your blood smudged on this printout
and you can be the proud possessor of a new voice synthesizer, listen—
He stands a Zenith portable on a table he makes from a modest suitcase,
attracting a small audience in the process, plugs in the voicebox, types at the
C> prompt: GO
and it recites in voice exact and fine:
Orientis princeps Bëelzebub, inferni irredentista menarche et demigorgon, propitiamus vows . . .
I hurry onward, hurry down the street
while paper ghosts, old printouts, dog my heels,
and hear him patter like a market man:
Not twenty
not eighteen
not fifteen
Cost me twelve lady so help me Satan but to you?
Because I like your pretty face
because I want to raise your spirits.
Five.
That’s right.
Five.
Sold to the lady with the lovely eyes . . .
V.
The archbishop hunches glaucous blind in the darkness on the edge of St. Paul’s,
small, birdlike, luminous, Humming I/O, I/O, I/O.
It’s almost six and the rush-hour traffic in stolen dreams
and expanded memory hustles the pavement below us.
I hand the man my jug.
He takes it, carefully, and shuffles back into the waiting cathedral shadows.
When he returns the jug is full once more.
I josh, “Guaranteed holy?”
He traces one word in the frozen dirt: WYSIWYG
and does not smile back.
(Wheezy wig. Whisky whig.)
He coughs gray, milk phlegm,
spits onto the steps.
What I see in the jug: it looks holy enough, but you can’t know for sure,
not unless you are yourself a siren or a fetch,
coagulating out of a telecom mouthpiece, riding the bleep,
an invocation, some really Wrong Number; then you can tell
from holy.
I’ve dumped telephones in buckets of the stuff before now,
watched things begin to form
then bubble and hiss as the water gets to them:
lustrated and asperged, the Final Sanction.
One afternoon
there was a queue of them, trapped on the tape of my ansaphone:
I copied it to floppy and filed it away.
You want it?
Listen, everything’s for sale.
The priest needs shaving, and he’s got the shakes.
His wine-stained vestments do little to keep him warm.
I give him money.
(Not much. After all,
it’s just water, some creatures are so stupid
They’ll do you a Savini gunk-dissolve
if you sprinkle them with Perrier
for chrissakes, whining the whole time,
All my evil, my beautiful evil.)
The old priest pockets the coin, gives me
a bag of crumbs as a bonus,
sits on his steps, hugging himself.
I feel the need to say something before I leave.
Look, I tell him, it’s not your fault.
It’s just a multi-user system.
You weren’t to know.
If prayers could be networked,
if saintware were up and running,
if you could make your side as reliable as they’ve made theirs . . .
“What You See,” he mutters desolately,
“What You See Is What You Get.” He crumbles a communion wafer
throws it down for the pigeons,
makes no attempt to catch even the slowest bird.
Cold wars produce bad losers.
I go home.
VI.
News at Ten. And here is Abel Drugger, reading it:
VII.
The corners of my eyes catch hasty, bloodless motion—
a mouse?
Well, certainly a peripheral of some kind.
VIII.
It’s bedtime. I feed the pigeons,
then undress.
Contemplate downloading a succubus from a board,
maybe just call up a sidekick
(there’s public-domain stuff, bawds and bauds,
shareware, no need to pay a fortune,
even copy-protected stuff can be copied, passed about,
everything has a price, any of us).
Dryware, wetware, hardware, software,
blackware, darkware,
nightware, nightmare . . .
The modem sits inviting beside the phone,
red eyes.
I let it rest—
you can’t trust anybody these days.
You download, hell, you don’t know where what came from anymore,
who had it last.
Well, aren’t you? Aren’t you scared of viruses?
Even the better protected files corrupt,
and the best protected corrupt absolutely.
In the kitchen I hear the pigeons billing and queuing,
dreaming of left-handed knives,
of athanors and mirrors.
Pigeon blood stains the floor of my study.
Alone, I sleep. And all alone I dream
IX.
Perhaps I wake in the night, suddenly comprehending something,
reach out,
scribble on the back of an old bill
my revelation, my newfound understanding,
knowing that morning will render it prosaic,
knowing that magic is a night-time thing,
then remembering when it still was . . .
Revelation retreats to cliché, listen:
Things seemed simpler before we kept computers.
X.
Waking or dreaming from outside I hear
wild sabbats,
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