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.