like coming up for air Sep 13, 2018

The language of the book is alien. The letters are tall with thin strokes connecting fat grains. Like wheat fields, the paragraphs ripple across the pages. An illustration catches your eye. A giant octopus with a million legs, gored through by a thousand spears, its legs reaching out into a million books, its pained eyes desperately searching. Translation cannot fail of an illustration. It has a million legs. You counted.

Suddenly it is so hard to keep our eyes open. The light hurts. But we must drink to be nimble; we can't lay tracks without hammers. And how are we going to get all this blood around the world if we don't have a train every minute? We must train every minute to buy into the fun. Because serious is good but a light touch feeds a man for a lifetime. Light is a cantrip, light but it can't rip, words from the page leap, the Flight of the Baskervilles. No cents keeping it open, said the debt collector, as he picked up his hammer and sickle. That's the surprise. Boustrophedon.

My spirit animals are the humming bird and the mantis. They are locked in war. Not with each other, but with their natures. So are we all. They both consume insects. They destroy self-replicating machines in order to sustain their own existence. So will we be destroyed. As food for a new god.

The herald approaches. The way rain does on a cloudy day. The way a fly drunkenly staggers at the other end of the room. The way bile creeps up your esophagus. The anticipation is like sunburn on a mosquito bite. Supergluing your fingers together. Dropping your phone in the toilet. The sound is a low altitude B-2 flyover. An explosion in space. The ocean pouring into a collapsing quarry. The herald approaches.

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like coming up for air

links to:
- a distant reflection
- a snowflake falls into the sun
- an essay for humans
- continental shelf
- i generally don't consume insects
- poetry is not a riddle with a single answer
- robots don't write poetry. anymore.
- slow fire
- the ocean will one day give up its dead
- they/them
- this unlight mantis creeps
- uncountable

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