Heading Out

So here’s me in a Viking ship drifting out into space it’s a fantasy of course the way I envision a good death look at all the drama I put into it ridiculous of course no death has that kind of glamour it’s all ego and cheesy sci fi posters the kind those heavy metal bands once favored for their vinyl record sleeves

Space isn’t a thing per se it’s an expression of interrelations among events when my words touch the air a skating rink explodes with Tonya Harding I like the way red powers its way into green and Tonya lands a triple axel imagine that you awaken one day to find yourself floating in a sealed elevator a fathom is a ceremony of depth thin-boned as a bird all masses all velocities all forces are relative

I’m hungry as a mailbox in Pittsburgh a divine presence has eaten our greed all we have left is one another the taste of a pineapple is sharp and generous adrift in deep space as the more furious energies in the wider universe of galaxies make me think of the faucets of finance as absurdly illusory I’m building space and time like Bill Frisell playing on his Yanuziello guitar a stack of papers black with equations at my elbow morning comes and delineates the crest of the mountains the entire world is but a grand illusion spun in the loom of force fields objects approaching the speed of light increase in mass I feel the temperature at the core of the sun in my vituperative misrule

The interferometer floats in a pool of mercury an enormous ooze seething with declension the clutch of the real holds a two-dimensional wafer of infinite mass I feel like a lost explorer discarding my things on the desert sand to lighten my load I don’t like making oaths my descriptions harden into bone and I keep walking keep following that photogenic grammar of string as matter curves space and I see a man’s head rotating in its mercury pool weaving a web of words across the sky

Ink and butter are lions of moral progress an aroused mind present in glimpses disperses periods of concentration with balance and precision and delights in moving worlds hurtling past one another at staggering speeds through the undulations of space

An old man on his way to acupuncture a ghost ship alive with Saint Elmo’s fire everything clinging everything reaching the whole shebang the modem the piccolo the misdemeanor all make me realize my job is in the nature of being not doing the new soap dispenser arrived yesterday it’s got a sensor you put a dish or your hand under there and soap squirts out

Like words I don’t like it when the same thought circulates in my head we refine our search for gold by walking sideways like crabs and tie molecules together to form objects

Everything on our planet has been created by a fat massive sun which hangs in the sky like an orange squashed between a titan’s hands what if the most exciting thing in life is to die an object increases when it absorbs energy picture a subversive gazing at the silken surface of the sea

Poetry amplifies the air a whirling magnet will generate an electrical current in a surrounding web of wire I knit a black noise bouncing radar waves off Mercury

Out yonder is this huge world which exists independently of us human beings and stands before us like a huge riddle I know my rights I know what I can say and what I cannot say this is true not just for a spaceship gliding toward the stars I have roots in Peru we look up to see a hawk every dynamo houses a whirling mystery I wear my hunger like I wear my sleeve rolled up and lenient nature lives in motion endless covers of “One More Cup Of Coffee” delivered with the energy of a steam engine mass and energy are interchangeable my transformation sparkles underwater

I rise and become a temperature squirting sperm everywhere I put my anguish up for sale my attention is absorbed by a raisin the invisible field that conveys magnetic force I’m a citizen of the universe it’s just that demon life has got me in its sway I fall into morning as morning falls into afternoon the flowers of sedition talk to one another sunlight penetrates the Black Forest I want to paint a flame like Georges de la Tour and push it toward the red end of the spectrum