Mean density of rubber buckshot thuds against the left side of your chest, where cardiograph blossoms tangled with the disk-image star’s genomic stutter, dulled cartridge juddering newly nerveless across grooves worked into kerogen wax and compressed exoskeleton, the milk we’ve wrung from insect marrow,
eaten sunlight feathering the wet-gate star’s medical imagery with chordate quills of charcoal, vertebral preamps each potential for the signal it might route and amplify to some englobing flesh, a dendrite map dwindling with heat loss till it terminates into such gasping syntax as the glyph must break across to get metabolized,
if partially, erratically, momentum altered by the buildup of its own approaching wreckage, swaddled in fallout, cinders to turn the morning richly gray as carbon-heavy glass, optical track snarled up with the feedback of a cell-disruption star and peaking hard on all immunologic frequencies to matte down any EQ’s osseous smile again, the helpless seething grin of the dentition underneath what meat could lend it the appearance of a face you might interpret, still, even this late, render decidable and then pass fractious inaccurate verdict upon, unsure, as we must be, whether that constitutes a habit more tenacious even than the habit of survival or survival’s best remaining chance.
How could you even think to know, how sieve criteria from the thinning upward current of the blood, coagulants and negative-plate albumen all clotted to a slow furling of undertow, dark and metamorphic as the blastula still unresolved between viable pregnancy and indrift of the rare metals we find here, quite by accident, if “finding” may occur without a recognition of the found. Scratch at any stem, rake fingernails down all split nervure of the leaf dead or apparently alive, hoard and sequester wave after randomized wave of aphids gone nearly translucent with the strange atoms their bellies can’t quite couple or unlink,
phytoextractor star a geologic index now of insoluble maths, the hapax algebra you might rake up from under the ice-sheets’ recent recession, impossible to explain except by some massive and secret migratory flight a million marked years before the target gene even had a name to be profaned, buzzed half-damped in a stanchion of fouled felt between the fricatives of code meant to be read but not pronounced, cofactor star clocked inorganic but adhering in the extracellular matrices of tape-degraded echo to all subsequent employ of the same hiss, tongue-flicker, half-numbed mumble falling
sometimes baffled by egg-carton polystyrene or acrylic snare of windscreen and popguard when you’re forced, for whatever reason, to speak on it, to testify in any of the word’s most common senses, in one of the small dark-gray rooms near the back, a drip of molten solder finished off with a hemisphere of frigid varnish like the bracketing caul of autoimmune fire where debris burns up on reentry, macrophage star’s lymphatic drift of viral glossaries from known script to the stranger reconstructions, alphabetic text now clearly just the scab over the pictograph still vital if in long-term biostasis,
a summer hibernation for a multiple exposure of strait seasons, always across the equator from wherever you are, simmering, to be sure, but only as does acid trapped in sterile soil, the white fretwork of lye that leaches earth and eye alike for many miles in all directions, sucking hard at the receded gums of strewn-out overburden to disguise abandoned mineshafts and the subtler, even worse forms of extraction not yet broadly known outside specialist argot. A few nouns acquire bleak currency, are sparked up for limp meaningless debate by men who are paid to appear across a table from each other, to offer such “debate” as will leave things exactly where they were before, save the conferral of some license for vile pomp on those involved and, to a lesser but significant extent, on those observing. Fuel for windy bullshit, basically, isotopic rods’ decay from Greek pillage to the Roman exhaustion of enunciated number, hydrocracked star sloshing its constituents from crude necropolis of dead cells, blistered membrane, organelle bled out in vast shivering rainbows whose signal always checksums an iridescent black, to aboveground crypts where gasoline might shelter, take its own pace, bond to public sleep while waiting for the agents of its charred dissemination.
As, indeed, you might’ve taught yourself to wait. What else, and why not, and how can you really be blamed. Soteriology is, in the main, a concern of religions with governments behind them, papal blessing or at least Vatican money, affairs of state brought in for something much less than ethical discrimination. You know the gig, and if you don’t, somebody will teach you. Degrees of sincerity vary, and it’s wonderful, really, the way you’re still allowed to decide for yourself (videlicet, to think you’re deciding for yourself, really to believe in not just the freedom but the import of that choice) how seriously you take it, how grim you are when you’re alone and how much grimmer in public manifestations of vaudeville seriousness, wearing the more expensive robes and with a miter cocked at whatever angle you think you can get away with, slumping forward full-bellied in High Egyptian drag as ripped off via local Roman cults, always urban and centralized, you understand, as a function of what you feel should be protected, as an exponential curve grown from whatever you think you’ve still got to protect.
Get out along the roads a little bit, even the circling feeders and frontage, or just follow the aqueducts to their termini, the dams to the homes of those who monitor them and those whom they’re sometimes obliged to drown, and you’ll be looking at the old devotions, stuff you thought consigned to folklore and etymology a long, long time ago: people burning oats and honey in clay pots on the first or last day of winter, people snapping dry stalks in late February, people with rain altars either coaxed straight up out of the earth or designed to look that way, a flat surface of cracked mud with roots and dead fleshy flowers hanging heavy from its foot-high sides, signal chain of rhizospheric star burst through the failsafe circuit breakers and the programmed separation of stock tracks to strangle fader’s insect undercarriage, poultice jogwheel’s housing with a net of fleshy grit, rupture LCD screen with a bioactive treatise on what green meant and can now be made to mean,
or even, and I’ve seen it, people running screaming through the blackened fields beneath a day not so much darkened by cloud as tangibly stained by its encroachment, shedding a patina of scabbed-over spores, scar tissue gone graphitic, the bituminous star’s hollow mollusk cavities heat-spliced into a single unresolved and pitchy zero – people tearing at their clothes and at the skin beneath, pulling hair out of their faces and scalps, sometimes in hoarse whisper-shriek after their voices rot away, in a mourning for the goddess or her daughter which began, this year, as every year, as something ceremonial and ends not with a rite but with the rite’s source welling up like worms from mud.
After the bindings and the masks, after the spent fluids dry and hardly even streak the fetid air, after the flesh sacramentally debased (we can conceive it so and, thus conceived, it’s born, however birth-defective, ruptured chorion star flowing from bone-dry matrices in a ragged lash of grape pulp and incomprehensible blood) – and how should it be otherwise; if the body is evil, if we are always and only carnally deceived, then you can
a) take the saint’s path of physical contrition, destroying yourself for the god who apparently made you, a morose delectation if ever I’ve heard of one, yours and the god’s alike, since he or it must enjoy or at least find necessary this process of utter waste, and you, saint as you are, can bear him no higher testimony of devotion than to watch yourself rotting in the middle of the day, on a pillar just high enough to remove you from the thought of common traffic underneath, not quite so high that you become a fixture of the skyline, an ongoing event like the weather, that slow scrawl of automations slowly breaking down, the autocrine star’s vector-mapped dysfunction, but high enough that the maggots in your sources, the larvae nesting where the skin has given out between the long bones of your feet, don’t disgust people below, not even when they’re visible in on a strangely clear day whose light cuts across hung strata of half-mist, no dampness on your hand or tongue, you understand, but a cool humidity to the air you find yourself gulping, suddenly jackal-gravid, heavy in the belly with a hunger meant to feed the birth of hunger, a desperation we’ll try and fail to append to the desperation due up next, build up some hopeless winter stores against a drought which strikes us, when it comes, more like a plague: here is no generality or “condition,” no simple enveloping phenomenon, nothing like weeklong rain or even the housebound malignity of snow, assuming you’ve got a house, opening the door every fucking hour on the hour to see the same gray drifts under the same burnt-out sky, failed quicksilver, halide ratios long toppled over, transformer blown over the buildup of a massive acoustic-transient star like thin skin bursting untouched over a cyst; that would be, at least to us and at the moment, down here exactly where we are, almost merciful; that would be at least a pain with widespread and smoothed-out symptomatology, something merely statistical, nonspecific, tracked as a discolored fluid mass across the borders of a topographic map in brittle plaster, something to watch and hide behind, to pursue toward those early corners of its passage where the heavy-hanging irresolution of the storm has started to burn away, and you can keep yourself on low boil in the odd shaft of glassy sunlight, epigenetics of a benzene-ring star, some concretized heredity of lens flare you can hold between your fingers and rub, a dusty squeak, a sound like enormous wings’ postmortem perturbation, mechanics of a dead moth’s flight explained with paper meat and exoskeleton still more or less intact
(so what, starvation there too, or a hopelessly brief lifespan, or tar over the spiracles, or just magnetic dissonance in the first truly horizon-spanning sky, the first register that moves like backlit gel beyond any groundbound and animal touch of specified weather, where the rain and the cold are only consequence, echo’s long elapsing and indifferent mutation, randomizing codestring babble of bacteriophage star filling out the empty text-fields as it must like alien but dormant spores settling dense and fried between the leaves of oily shale);
the drought isn’t like that; it hits you right the hell where you live, or rather used to live; it can only be rationalized by those few who aren’t suffering under it, and as soon as you hear the excuses start to move, fire up for news footage like large motile machinery milling around among the construction sites and dead gasworks on the horizon and never actually seeming to alter anything, though there’s a periodic dried-out landslide crash of dead architecture dumped into mass graves, well, you violently, helplessly hate whoever’s making those excuses, and you’re not wrong, though hate will probably not avail us much; put aside ethical tortures for the moment; ask only how hate moves and where its movement finally settles and as what classical humor, the bile gone black or choler flaring like a tangle of plasma from the rind of the infected sun; rage is probably better, and hate, in this instance, is little more than rage become inertial and routine; or
b), if you’re not a saint, and you probably aren’t, you can take out all the saint’s mortifications on somebody else’s body, and thus satisfy your god that, if you’re not among his most elect, you still have striven both to comprehend and to enact his will as he himself enabled you to do so. How could he resent that. Is he likely to prickle with parsimony over your vast expenditure of his creatures which, after all, he only cobbled together for the bitter syrup to be milked from their eventual deconstruction. God doesn’t make so many saints, so god must understand the arbitration of the less sanctified, the physics of their flagellant displacement, the national ghosts they excavate (if only from their own contagious sleep) and use as contrast agents, vital stains, gentian sickness to tell corpses their new names.