NO LIGHT

I look in the mirror. I can't believe what happened to my eyes. I'm not there. They look flipped upside down. All I can do is leak, leak, leak-- the sink catches them; nothing else. A pillow catches them, nothing else. I pretend there is any detachment long enough to run away from it. But there isn't.

I saw my devil today, in the parking lot. He was not well hidden. Half-crouch, slow, hands splayed crabwalk back around the carport brick, back to the waiting side of the dumpster. Blue hood pulled tight around peanut brittle face. He lets me know the arrangements have been made, and now it's just the wait. And I need to give the tailor my measurements.

How is evil born into the world, many ask. With blink the word in the heart. With the word in blink the heart and a backward shuffle, I answer.

DECLARATION

The seed of Paradise is a prescient bullet lodged in the heads of a secret Elect-- sculpted, emerald ammunition fired from a long, smooth gun, but touched off the wrong way in time. Can't you see Eden up there, hanging away from the sun, hiding in the moon's brown face 'til she blinks-- the bold brows of her vacuum desert flashing green once a few bare, aching years? Some of us stare, necks crooked; arches numb in the dirt, just for once to see her flash under that jewelled light-- never even knew how long we had waited for the seminal arc-- now with pens held erect and ready like well-ordered ashigaru, awaiting the collective suck of breath; daring a desperate ecstasy; awaiting the blow of a hard breeze and the wave of shoulders slumped in retreat as she buries herself in the sea, unloving. The ink leaks out of us and spreads in clouds. Everything we are denied becomes scripture; becomes law.

There is a zebra crossing between the land and the sky-- a static ferry for the surrogate Garden, with clods of clutching saints mangling the duality of stripe itself, up there. Don't you swear you see it? Orbital Heaven. But irradiated pilgrims never survive the chicken strut jaunt across the street-- they explode like little pot pies and bleed; bleed out in the pedwalk to the stars. Extra-vehicular homicide, choking the upladder with hunks of mystery meat and depressurized fluidic foam, forming a fog of mutilated, motile occlusion. One day we will see a ring forming-- a halo born against the sky-- a sigh-- a just-slight reflection sometimes in chalkmark blue on royal blue-- the frozen pulp of the trudging, stumbling sages hung up like a neck; hung up like a thumbnail pressed cruelly into skin, and not only a few of their earnest tears. We've all got to cry sometime in the absence of God.

We, like them, want our holy pilgrimage too-- but there is no here to be there from. Why no summit, cloaked in panhead thunder or sheathed in shame with seraphim executioners stalking the pathways up? Our world is rather like some grande dame's guest bed-- we've got to sleep to get anything right during salon, even if we'll abandon every film halfway through. We know how each one ends. Yet through the walls, we are awoken by the woofing of perhaps more sensible apes. They bluster and yelp about some foreign mercy, some safe currency, metrics ever threatening to welcome us home, so that we might do some beast's bidding before the last. But we've settled in so snugly, heads uncovered, to honor the coming years of quiet blame.

Ahh, but the emerald eye; her emerald flash-blush; her blazing emerald bush-- a glint within a glint within crackling fiction-- films finished after all! FIN-- a hidden function, burgeoning with nested nests-- crimson birds against the slate-green, cupped hands of the junipers; recursion with a terminal sigma-- see its bounds? A rounded square of a sagging formality bent toward love, both hammer-dull and scaplel-sharp, with no silent Father subpoenaing the pinioned lovers to the pinnacle of his lap! I walk by mistake on emerald feathers, crozzing zebras of Turkey Street, Robin Row, Cardinal Circle, Crow Place-- they're backhand birds down there, sick of this age and sick of me, always prodding at their eggs. I might break them, like every thing else I touch.

They know that, in fact, I am the Big Liar presiding over their air. I'm the one up here in this bullshit Garden, watching all the sin spread like urine. I piss upon them influences, watering the lawn from high above. My couch is that spun mausoleum of huge, cool leaves, dripping stones from which to drink sweet water, aromatics in the bleedproof air a balm for breathing in. I'm the sole occupant of this jungle-gem-globe-- a preaching, telepresent sham. I project my simulacra around the pisscrack mudball below, laughing and pranking and spooking the fools to try, oh blessed ones, just try to climb high... high. I've mined Jacob's Ladder with X-ray lasers, fragmentation submunitions, chaff charges, and bladed, geo-synchronous catapult traps, all too matte to make out when I switch on the night.

I'm the five-fold whiplash as knotted serpents in me uncoil-- a shrapnel bomb cored with fissile vertebrae. I'm the final flash, neutrino green through shut up eyes-- climax scream of the shuddering moon--

I've been a long time coming.

VEIL

We've pierced the membrane of sleep with our knives. We've climbed in, careful not to tear it too far. It's hot in here, like a berry about to burst. Grievously hot and sickeningly sweet. Our facial bones pulse, pregnant with a forming, inner mask of sweat, about to bloom on us, on our cheeks to fracture the sky and make the moon run along slickened ridges-- glints of unconnected letters, like a babbling transliteration of an organ leaking in runaway crisis, wringing out its dreams as a dark, oxidizing serum.

Like a dual recession of fetal twins, slowly disassembled back into an encompassing, spongiform engorgement, we've managed to adjust our spectral signatures to that of the background; melting in; hidden; invisible; uniform against the heartbeat gloom of morning-- grey games made blood-fled white, like flesh pressed hard-- to the collapse of radiance and the eviction of street wolves from sublevel and machine-level; fast garden with crisscrossed daemons catalyzing function-- surveilled panes shunted into glandular displays, unpausing into bunched, charging, maniac motions-- a smile pools like a bruise, eclipsing the pan-faces of our precessional discs, veins thickening and sex-blue on dull dusk, orbit after orbit, dance upon dance.

To hell with the halos, driving the tubby flocks of bleating killers on patrol. At last the final Mother comes, stuck and bristling with medical knives. Our abortion, her crown, with flowers gathered in her roadside haze, covered from hair to feet in a painted, gauze delirium-- her murder shroud fucked on and fucked open, scouted and probed and groped, pinched and pinned and splattered and stabbed; a traumatic insemenation zombie, pregnant with shock force. We watch our Mother die, there in the lilac bushes, still bleeding out.

Dancers on a dark horizon, we harmonize in sympathy-- in the intimate, mutual dismemberment, procedural forms echoing the black bodies blotting out the chains of stars with curved blades; extensions of the limbic will. We are entropic surgeons. The first sutures, beginning to tug shut the purse lips of artifact freedom-- to conceal ourselves from the chugging maul of the great wheel, ache with life.

TEST FLIGHT

Numb becomes discontent some mornings; ones washed out by snored-over night storms-- walking outside, everywhere there's evidence of the air having wept itself dry, ignored like a broken-hearted lover in the next room; little rivulets have deposited yesterday's pollen in saffron oxbows, or leering Masonic eyes, clumped tentatively to all the parked cars' more protected geometries, the places too tough to rinse out. Clinically speaking there was, then, a process-distribution overnight, owing to process engineering-- one technological and one natural, like two fantasies slowly colliding, their edges actually becoming each other's in spun Lorenz trajectories, convolving desire with the numb-- discontent with the networked birdsong, weaving the chance thrown blanket that mutes the silent sob in the throat of everything.

I'm just calculating my cold way forward, yawning like a fatal avulsion.

I'm the digital firebird, snuffling out the bushes of the nominally pious; one palsied winglet flopping in tipsied earnest at the heat, fanning the quivering jelly of waxing age, beginning to run like mascara tears in long black blots down my hookbill as I caw and scope the energetic body of the electronic weald.

Look there-- a rise in the gravel lot like a pubic hump; cool blue stools of cut trunks-- a ritual site encircling a charcoal brazier-- censer! Glans! Tip of the pinnacle of hot, hidden structures, deeping somewhere dark inside the mons.

Scoop by orbital scoop I will describe this planet in bands of infrared and radar-- find a face to tag and section-- a cove of mouth there, eyes in shadow-dappled mesa here; artificial rings set against the desert's visage, a surety of metal-bright, xenotypic intelligence. Ridged brows like midnight caterpillars about to meet in inching delight, but turning away to dance instead some diacritic semiosis. Their spawn hatches and a new alphabet is born. Infant phonemes stream about the topological face-- they seek some mechanism, some process by which to actuate-- there, a tongue meets the roof of the cavern mouth, about to speak. Predator, I, snatch the holiest ones in my beak, and gobble them down.

To come softly to final synchrone, and fly the glide-stroke back to order, back to patience-- even to have cast some pain out into space as waste heat, is the artist's mark upon the work of love. Yet no one who speaks so loosely ought to be trusted. In the lyrics of Alastair Parker:

We're on a planet together, but that doesn't mean we are together.