Snowstorm Blackout...*

Imperatives:
Rock luminaries and neo-sadist post-grads from the school of hard knocks, easy lays. Made in America, fresh of the grill, hot off the presses and dribbling red ink. Industry towers, insipid smoke rings. River run thick w. mud & trash; total re-hash. Standing in yr. wake. Enormous weight of influence and I'm under the influence and you--have a curious way about you...like a feline grace, could be sex appeal --could be shake appeal--maybe lust or indigestion. (mimes indiscretion). Other suggestions given in bad taste. Escapist tendency--no vacancy--emergency room tenant.

Towering stalagmites deep earth tremors and the tenor of reverberant deceit. (Sweet and Meet! Sweet, and Decorous!). Incomplete and rough-hewn window dress. Deep red arterial spray--warms yr. heart--another toxic impulse and phlegm rattle inside the cholera-blue-biled royal son--deviant house servant insolent smirk and now the milk is wasted. White white milk straight from the teat gone sour, gone sour. in a quarter of an hour. that's the one. sullies me 'n' you. that's the milk of human kindness.

etc, etc.

*tx J.

Astronaut's Log: Forbidden Fruit

1.0

The very same weightlessness that once seemed so liberating has now become utterly toxic. That there is gravity in nothing here—that all is in a constant and furious state of flux (hurried ‘how are you’s’ and awkward quiverings of the lips)—is the root cause of this unusual depression.

1.1

In the canteen Lt. S---- prepares frozen berries for a late night snack. She offers me some in a bowl at the end of one slender, feline limb. I gratefully accept a few and I sit there, talking and talking. Nothing lost, nothing gained.

Eventually, I take one encrusted raspberry from the bowl and its inky juice stains my thumb and index finger. I begin to chew and taste only a trickle of sweetness. I try to savor the little that is there.

My patience at an end, I take another, and mash the bloody blue-black currant between my freezing teeth. I look towards S----, who has her back turned, and I watch with shameful attention the way that she prepares the fruit. She turns now, and I let my guilty gaze wander over the comfortless furniture of the place. I glance back, and for a single moment it seems to me that there is more than a little of Mother Nature left to us still. It is like a sleeping lion, or a panther waiting to pounce, and for a short while I can feel something stir inside of me. My heart begins to beat to a faraway drum.

The ruins of life are there. Somewhere, buried in a heap at the bottom of some Marianas Trench, it lurks undetected. Only, time is of the essence. A spring is pressed between two great providential fingers, and when will they let go?

…TRANSMISSION ENDS.




Originally posted on Anesthetic Hymns

Astronaut's Log: Laika

2.0

On 3rd November 1957 the Soviet Union sent a mongrel dog into space aboard the Sputnik-2 spacecraft. They smoothed her coat with rubbing alcohol and they attached electrodes to her body. Once in orbit, she lasted from about five to seven hours before succumbing to the extreme temperature and stress of being catapulted into space. Her name was Laika. The word means “barker.”

From the portal in my bedroom I can see the earth, huge and magnificent, turning in oblivion. I imagine Atlas struggling beneath its terrific weight and for a minute I’m completely overcome with sympathy. I try to imagine all the lives that are beginning and ending on the planet below, but I do not shut my eyes. I tell myself, “This is your home. This is the place where you were born.”

I keep staring through the little pane of glass until I lose focus and I am suddenly presented with my own reflection. My features are taut and I have high cheekbones. My hair is buzzed almost to the skin and I can hardly recognize the face that returns my gaze. I turn away from the window and try to fix my mind on vague events of the distant past.

I am a child of seven. The sunshine floods the empty street and I am riding my bicycle around the pagoda of the neighborhood park. Then I’m eighteen again, sitting on the hood of my dad’s car and staring up at the moon on a humid summer night. Next, I am lying in a bed freshman year of college. A girl is singing something from The Phantom of the Opera.

Images rise and fade. Voices echo and die. I look back through the portal—back at the earth. I let my mind go blank. Then I rest my eyes on a random, distant star and I think about Laika hurtling through the deep void.

They smooth her coat with rubbing alcohol and they place electrodes on her body. She barks and wags her tail. One of her trainers strokes her head gently and, I hope, has shed some tears. She gazes from the portal. The last man out averts his eyes.

5…4…3…2…1…

...TRANSMISSION ENDS.




Originally posted on Anesthetic Hymns

Astronaut's Log: There is the Flower

3.0

In the oxygen garden I have seen a lovely flower. It has pallid blue petals that remain crisp even when the misters run. The light in the garden is unkind; the white, numbered walls austere and uninviting. Still, the delicate beauty of this lovely flower draws me back and back again. I stand, even now, gazing upon the precariously poised blossom. I am reminded of a dream I once saw hanging in a now long-forgotten gallery. It was a riverside scene in pastels. Another reverie comes to mind, this one painstakingly recorded in the visions of Chaucer. The young poet lies in a merry field, his eyes heavy with the tiresome strain of “the olde bookes,” and he contemplates the dandelion. How he adores the precious wild dandelion! For a long time he is perfectly happy there, enraptured, whiling away the happy hours and making love to his happy flower. The faery court arrives. The poet is chastised. He is grave and, perhaps like Dante, near the point of swooning. The faery king defers to his devastatingly beautiful kinswoman. A ghastly pale blossom upon her cheek, she charges the poet to write on the works of good women, so that he might atone for untold wretched libels.

3.1
Hands, that cut the rose. Bleeding hands, that have too much felt the barbed stem. Funny how the rose is our favorite flower. We can’t resist it. It’s too poetic. I think about some frozen roses in one of the supermarkets back home. How lonesome can you get? Try to think about dried up rose petals. Some pressed in a book. Some crushed into weird open house potpourris. I think of many things to say to a rose. I think to myself, “This is the day I shall speak my mind,” but even Churchill struggled with speech impediments in his youth.

I dream of the day. I imagine the soft-filtered reel of the unreal running in a smoky movie house before my mind’s eye. The day never comes. Never comes the day, and other clichés. If I wrote one ode to a rose I must keep it short, spruce. Not more Petrarch, not mere romance. Just some simple, objective words upon the usual subjects.

3.2

I gather my thoughts like so many fallen petals, and resume my duties on one of the upper decks. In the research labs and conference rooms, my colleagues and I scour endless data reports and star maps into the wee hours of another stealth morning. There is a ceaseless furrowing of brows and smearings of hands over faces as we push ourselves harder, and ever closer to the brink, in a race against time. Time.

“If we had but world enough, and time.”

…TRANSMISSION ENDS.




Originally posted on Anesthetic Hymns