Brad Walrond

The New Earths 

    a contrapuntal

The gene code must brake
the abstractions here
coincident, unkind


in time.  how to diffract
The flammable and the fluid
What do afterbirths do?


with those rancid ontologies
so staged with the myth of us
suffered by poor direction


In one seismic hailstorm,
of pills and memes
cut to the bone


 pixie and mortar
lie convinced
to take one final step

              no finish line
No hereafter
to colonize some new Earth

No technology to save us
We are the rare earths

swift, sudden, hard
a crash all around us
Kissed cousins can’t always decide.


the repudiated outcome. 
breach the incorrigible in us. 
At our abandoned scene


so sickened with our sin
the sodden script, 
prescribes our certain death


among the piles
Our exoskeletons trample
at the earthquake bottom


on a World Trade Center stair
futures still require a now
or else. There is nothing;

no second chance,
No billionaire false self
out there somewhere

We are the new earths
We’ve been waiting for.

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Brad Walrond is a poet, author, mixed-media performance artist, and activist. He is a graduate of The City College of New York and earned his M.A in Political Science from Columbia University. Brad’s poetics, performance, and multi-disciplinary work spans the nexus between virtual reality, identity formation, and human consciousness at the intersection of race, gender, sex, and desire. Brad’s poetics and praxis calls upon his 20 plus years as an HIV/AIDS activist, and working with women of color, LGBT adults and adolescents and incarcerated men of color. His work with dynamic marginalized communities continues and has taken him across the country and as far as São Paulo, Brazil and Taipei, Taiwan.