digital gothic: a spellbook for the new sorcerer (new work 3)
This piece of the puzzle appears to be complete.
Comments are always welcome and appreciated.
(bear in mind that formatting this poem as it should appear is difficult given the limitations of wordpress and how it interfaces with word)
"On her eyelashes the fog brings you trembling mercury…"
-The Fog, Carlos V. Suárez
Fig. 22: Gate Crashing: [Playlist: iBenji, Seems]
it all starts with an itch that inward look:
then a twist and counter
the speed of oscillation varies with distance from the center of the creature but
the body already knows how to get to other worlds
close your eyes if you must but trust
the break follow the wobble it's a flywheel in your pocket
timing the path of intersection with the already turning
to converge and merge and merry-go-flung
the motion always invisible at onset but you feel it coming
deep inside an internal tissue
a supermassive formation collapsing into a relativistic star
please don't stop cracking the excitable cells in the dragon's tail
until the spike train rolls
with great speed and oscillating friction
from the mouths of voltage-gated channels
and you erupt across the threshold of the rapidly expanding pattern:
I can't tell you, dear sorcerer, what your path to the gates will look like:
all internal language is a secret working
but hang tight in that crawlspace
the worst of the ride is reaching cruising speed
and I can send some guides:
(in the mean time)
enter scarab glittering
on iridescent wings, towing
by fine filaments grasped in hindmost legs
an intricately woven cobweb banner that reads
up and down one column at a time
as well as across, from left to right:
"contrasting" viewpoints on your journey divide prominent philosophers:
Sir Isaac Newton's view is a time to give and a time to dance as other "times" persist,
this view becomes a time to mourn effectively killing time at the time of death
and a time to die is part of the fundamental embrace like frames of a film strip, a spread structure of time to plant time to uproot across neither future event nor plucked thing
what is planted: a dimension in which events sewn then grown (non-discrete, Immeasurable) occur as objects in a sequence a birth a container one could step in or out of but
a silence kept a together lost a wasted search, give up, tear apart, kill, weep, love, hate laugh (that's Leibniz, Kant) the transport time itself an idea certainly but not a thing
a fundamental structure travel-able as thought
(and on a second banner, clinging to the first
via some dust bunnies and a chain of bluish laundry lint:)
Travel:
to go from one place to another, as on a trip; journey;
to go from place to place as a salesperson or agent;
to be transmitted, as light or sound; move or pass;
to advance or proceed;
to go about in the company of a particular group; associate: (travels in wealthy circles);
to move along a course, as in a groove;
to admit of being transported without loss of quality (some wines travel poorly);
Informal: to move swiftly;
Basketball: to walk or run illegally while holding the ball;
the second "l" in the word ball is festooned with busily stitching spiders,
as the passage of time cannot be directly perceived as it happens
but must be re-membered to exist
unendingly given arms and legs
and breathed:
(from trembling drops
spun into vibrating strings)
whose loose ends are lashed and threaded
spliced into the meanwhile by your guides
who have arrived
traveling on the fingertips of the fog
the ravens of Point Conception and Point Reyes:
one has wings contrapted of hollow reeds
lashed to his body by a harness of syntonic commas
every wingbeat a major or minor every dive a glissando
subtle shifts in his primary flight feathers give rise to the dissonance of angels
the melodies of monsters
blind, he glides along the chain link fence of now
dragging his wingtips against the diamonded stutter
knowing where he is by the tone of his harmonics
and by the heat signature of his partner:
she is a blue-black fire
urgent and reckless and easily distracted
condensing the immediate in her hot smell
of dirty underfeathers and contagious desires
made visible as the virga her wingtips cast: black beams slicing triangular seams of now bounded by darkness
but admitting a light that illuminates
points further on:
you are a shadow strung between these shadows
cast through fog (the fog of which you're made,
the fine-flung particles on which you're hung)
a medium through which you will learn to gate crash
to give in to scatter
to understand that piano notes unfurling from the banks of folds and whorls
the waifish threnody of thin and distant notes
can open in a vast and clammy throat from which no lighthouse lamp or lens or flame
can cast a plumb line
only a flux a flex a blur of synthesis of sense
the tap of one feather against the next
and against nearby wingtips
will unlock the braille of entrance
from the sea smoke:
(in this instance)
the Iron Horse
rears clear of the haar and fret gripped thick amid her ribs
(those harpstrings the dream houses pluck on nightly flights)
the blood orange foramen of her double spine:
windows squaring this world with the next
her vermillion scapula and hip caught mid-gallop
the movement of her form so slow as to appear a solid
rostrum thrust forward and tail to ground
her belly stretches taut to guard
cargo ships climbing down the ocean's edge
tugboats and sabots yaw around her fetlocks
forged of ashes she waits of course to rise from ashes
staring down into her mare's nest
past the surface shadow
across which hot life skims into and out of living commerce
to the bluer pulse that breathes below the echo current of what was and still is
a tide of tall ships spilling their bones at the hem of california's skirts hemorrhaging their riches of flea-bitten, half-starved hopes
dispersed and drifting in and out through their mistresses' unlaced eyelets
the silky clacking of all that's left of this influx currents tides
a sea change of ash pearls collecting in the divots and channels
beneath waves of intolerable golden itches swathed
in layer upon layer of alternating hopes and madnesses
hard little nuggets lodged in the surrounding softness
dug free and sluiced measured in dust on scales
cast into ornaments and promise rings now clattering loose on the bare knuckles
of the not-so-long dead in long forgotten graves
beneath the golf course the library the museum
hugging the plumbing sailing slow in vessels rarefied by rotting
what remains after flesh and bone and memory have long since dispersed?
a sussurence that lures the jumpers
the risk to all who perform this alchemy: a mercury a gorgeous poison
slipping perpetually
back and forth between home and Land's End: a transistor
the precious metal points of contact through which pass travelers worldly and otherwise
drawn irresistibly to edges
whether by expansion or collapse
big bang or whimper or barbaric yawp whether by dream or death
it's all the same unmapped certainty
so you can bunker down and be taken by force
or follow the ravens
who stretch their black fingertips to build up drag and static
then clasp their wings tight to slip the quicksilver light
and dive beak first into the dirt
