missing
the suns
beyond
our own. The future
is
a hard limit, the arc of history
long
enough that no one here
will
ever see enough of it.
Long
after humans, maybe
two-hundred
thousand years old,
would
long have been buried
in the Earth’s
graveyard,
itself.
~~~~
Art is a kind of
engagement
with the future, depleting resources
so
it can replicate itself. What art does in crisis,
machines
do in space
over
a few million years. Poems are fast enough
their
language is not forgotten, buried.
Whatever you
create
while reading this
is my intellectual
property
and you creep me
out.
~~~~
By
the time anyone looks us up, we’ll be dust,
void,
ashes scattered into the galaxy’s ocean,
itself.
Wake
up knowing
there are only enough mornings. Wake
up
knowing no one
knows
we’re here. Wake up knowing
we
won’t be missed. Lonely,
alone enough out here.
I’m not worried
about my future—
there’s a hard
limit to it.
Worry
without really meaning it. There’s a hard limit.
~~~~
An
egg hatched, an astrochicken— a machine
that’s alive and giving birth
to itself. Four million years
of a future that’s not ours, of
replicated mornings. Life
an
infinite loop until it rebuilds itself.
Pre-history
for future Earthlings. We are
relics,
mythology.
Time
is terrorism unstoppable, exiled. A refugee of time.
I assemble you, call you into being,
my baby universe.
A
limited number of possibilities in an infinite universe:
not everything is
permissible.
~~~~
I
stood in a room
and
looked at all the things in it—
things that had been bought,
given, taken. I am
just
as guilty. We are not guilty
because
the house is divided—
we
are guilty because
we
are the ones
that
divided it. Dying this way
may
have been easy enough
but
we’re living in a denial
that
cannot hold itself together
forever,
even if it can replicate itself
endlessly
by draining us,
a
planet, a star, a cow, a child, an Earth
of
all resources, a parasite, our disease
spreading
out across a galaxy for millions of years
after
we’ve already killed ourselves
and
left evidence in the only graveyard
no
one can find.
~~~~
Went
into the river clean and came out with
one
eye damaged. Was told there was time now
but
heard it differently. I cannot hear
any
of you:
the screamings of the mind have
made ears
of new
ghosts. It's not the words that are hollow,
just the
voice behind it. Ready to be something
other
than deceived.
~~~~
A
lotus wilting above an abyss: locked out of the
unisex
bathroom, bleeding, right leg first. Beginnings
mean
nothing without your head
in
an oven. It’s the way it’s
said
that gets one in trouble; it’s the way it
breathes
that chokes. It’s afternoon:
sirens
are heard as they pull through
the
intersection.
~~~~
Time
now for the earth below
to
stand open: bringing the mountain in
means
hearing its cries
in
the night. One seed buried below,
one above.
One
caught, strangled. About prayers
that
settle into the room: I
set
their skin on fire as the music stopped.
NOTE:
FuturePanic encompasses macro and
micro concerns to transform the reader’s sense of space and time and force them
to engage with the present era’s perceptions of death, politics, and the border
at which they meet. The opening (presented here) considers the Von Neumann
Machine, an as-yet impossible organic machine designed to replicate itself
across the galaxy over the next 400,000 years. Conceptual, expensive, and
perplexing, the Von Neumann Machine raises questions present throughout FuturePanic – who benefits from the long
reach of technology? How do the earth-bound conceive of transformation light
years away? And how do mortals deign to simultaneously explore the potential
for never ending life at the cost of killing death for machines, while
grappling with their own limitations – corporeal death, political conceit, and
economic destruction of the world around them? Is the quest for knowledge that
may outlast us all worth stargazing above the screams of others in the here and
now and the cries of our own limited bodies and minds?
No comments:
Post a Comment