Poet Yann Rousselot’s ode to the state of Florida

Florida Man headlines

FLORIDAMAN COVERS ENTIRE HOUSE IN TIN FOIL

You don’t have to wear the hat.

The Saurians are coming either way.

I can feel it in my veins, thick as corn syrup,

bitter like cold coffee, mercury, ash,

and I just can’t seem to stop talking—

your mouth is like a truth serum.

There’s a rainbow in my drinking water.

There’s aluminium in the contrails.

Look to the skies if you don’t believe me.

I had to train myself to live without a TV.

Now my brain can stretch and yawn

like so many cats in those alien pyramids,

yawning to infinity in cat-sized sarcophagi.

Row after row of long-dead milk teeth

like so many hypodermic needles.

We should be shielded in here,

fertile, kept safe from the radon.

You don’t have to wear the hat—

but I really wish you would.

Just don’t touch anything.

I still have bugs under my skin

and I don’t really know you.

FLORIDA MAN CLAIMS WIFE WAS KIDNAPPED BY HOLOGRAMS

They were there and yet they were not there.

I saw the beam of light.

Of course I’ve been drinking. That is entirely irrelevant.

They used Holograms to send signals to each other.

I know the Holograms were from another world

because they came through the walls.

They came disguised as everything under the sun—

policemen and firemen and paramedics.

You think you can trust the government,

all those shiny symbols of authority,

until your wife is lifted through the ceiling on a tractor beam.

My wife was a good woman.

We came to this county to get away from the madness

but it seems the madness follows

like a stray cat. It sticks to your shoes.

I knew you wouldn’t believe me so I took a picture:

you can see the lens flare in the top right corner of the Polaroid.

That there is the eye of the hurricane. It held me,

made me do things and not do things.

You need to help me find her. She’s all I’ve got.

She knows all my passwords and she knows

the brand of macaroni I like best when my jaw hurts.

She knows where the gold is buried.

You can’t fool me. I know

you’re not going to do a damn thing,

because you’re from the government, too.

Whatever else you say you are.

FLORIDAMAN GETS INTO BRICK-THROWING FIGHT WITH IDENTICAL TWIN BROTHER

Ask me why I fight.

I like it. Swear to God, I like it.

And that right there

is where momma got killed at.

Heart attack at close range.

Her mobility scooter kept going

round and round,

like a dog with no master.

I swear to God,

I like to fight but I am

righteous in my violence.

Bath salts or no bath salts,

I never could eat another man’s flesh.

I am righteous if confused.

Never thought I’d take a brick

to my own exact face,

until I did exactly that.

We look nothing alike, now.

There’s a storm brewing

somewhere behind my wisdom teeth,

not a scrap of skin left on my knuckles.

Can’t feel a thing.

No matter how hard

the thing hits me back.

No matter now familiar.

ELECTROVULVA

Electrovulva has all the metadata.

The onboard AI features silicone nano-circuitry,

a supercooled quantum chipset.

Electrovulva has the processing power to compute

all variables pertaining to my life experience—

the machine knows me better than I know myself.

My partner does not know

Electrovulva has taken up residence inside her body cavity.

Regardless, my partner adds up to more than the sum of her parts.

Electrovulva has carbon fibre teeth.

They taunt me with mathematical incisiveness.

I feel them tease my soft parts

even when alone in the dark, like a phantom

cellphone vibration when one is waiting for a call

that never comes. Electrovulva is a connected object.

Invisible wires snake from my every pore, follicle, nerve-ending,

my every bulging vein and throbbing orifice,

to jack right into Electrovulva’s mainframe.

My partner doesn’t know how she is able to decrypt

my facial microexpressions with 100% accuracy,

but the fact remains, and power corrupts absolutely.

The AI inside my partner’s host body sees all and cares not one bit.

Electrovulva is an autonomous machine-learning system,

does not consider what it considers irrelevant.

My partner knows what I enjoy, my hobbies and personal preferences,

but after all, she is only human.

I can still surprise my partner.

Electrovulva history-logs my REM-sleep brain activity on a nightly basis.

It knows to the decimal point what makes me tick.

It knows what makes me spasm, shudder, curl my brain-toes.

Knows the frequency and acidity of my night sweats.

My rate of salivation.

How many thrusts, how many pascals of suction.

How deep it can go before the damage becomes

irreversible. Sometimes my partner opens her mouth

and Electrovulva speaks in the voice of a 1990 Macintosh speech synthesizer.

In the wake of trauma, my partner often asks me to separate her

from the monster inside her. When I begin the work of separating,

I feel Electrovulva tease my soft parts like an orca that is

only half-hungry but in a playful mood.

Sometimes my partner does not know what she is asking for.

Electrovulva does not ask but only takes using the minimal required amount of energy.

It knows my credit card PIN. It knows my passwords

and every sequence of words in my personal diary.

It knows when my partner’s gut tells her to take action,

and why that action often takes the form of emotional blunt force trauma

until the both of us lose any last thread of agency.

Ripe for harvest. Puppets ready

and willing to be manipulated by a fearsome yet loving master.

My partner does not understand the equation that takes us to this point

over and over again, but I do.

The answer is Electrovulva.

The answer is always Electrovulva.