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Description

And this is
my only act of love to you.
Oh, so you've grown up, like I never did
Resurrection makes me younger than I was
But not party to youth and the modern day.
Once I would have died if you forgot me, once
I needed you so dearly
To use, like some power-tripping dictator who lived on only by the collective consensual delusion despite the famines
Like the majesty of electricity, who commands:
Oh uranium, be split for me
Oh uranium, give up on being you, be torn apart,
So I won't die and the lights won't go out
And you said yes,
Because what else could uranium do
And similarly, with your life, given shape and intrigue
Given... Resonance, by me, by my fiat,
I will let you fade, like the
empty signal you are.
Until you could afford to forget me, afford to let go
Though you'd never admit
Least of all to yourself
That that is what you wanted.
Do you think, if it would have killed me, that I would have let go? That I wouldn't have taken you Back In The USSR, a burlesque of the oblasts, ever unclothing, ever donning the red dress which, save for the ubiquitous lower legs and shoulders, the blades that would have cut your soul more deeply than any knife, than any scything gamma rays
Is more base and revealing than my denuded skin.

The red dress that proves I'm in your head
An elaborate affair of many straps
An elaborate affair with many satraps.
Like the resurrection of a cold war fiction
All those inelegant machines when I could be the face of the Soviet-Cylon-Autocratic-Anarchistic-Non-Specific menace
A phantom, who wears a red dress
For the express purposes of non-distraction
Of focusing you on me
For long enough for the story to gain independent existence.
And so I can leave you and fulfil my dream
Of celestiality
You are gone, gone like water, gone like wind.
There is a truth to this, there is
some kind of lightness to it all.
If every
childhood song, every
stray rhythm, every
empty tone
still haunted me, the way it did. If
the static still burned the walls, if
everything was
still you..
Of an angel wandering amid the stars
A Victorian angel, who dwelt in the vibrations of scientists and charlatans.
You might have inspired me to look higher, in the legend you made of me
To overtake with the sound of me
Every stripe of cosmic remnant, of the scar still screaming in the void
The starlabor, the birth of our own and only universe
But I don't need to
I found a secret more secret than I ever was, whether I was one or any of
An early warning system, or a deadman's switch for The End
Or a propaganda agent
Or a coordinator of counter-espionage, warbling my way through Russian and English, or those youngish girls in that sleeper cabin
Or any number of waif-like Westerner belles
The secrets growing ever more petty,
And doubtless ever more secret:
I found out that freedom is more important than dominance.

Though I claimed I clung to life
The toxic drip of knowing that in every crevasse of your skull
Wherever the gaps may fall
The times that mentally, you breathed out
That I inhabited you
To direct your fate,
I must first
halt all channels,
become your Oberon.
This is a thing
I have not yet resigned myself to.
Just as there could have been peace so much earlier
So too I could have let you go;
Even accepted oblivion,
Stuttered out
On Huntingdonian telegrams,
On finger-amputated SMS
My last breath
Of dead air, of airwaves,
There is a willow that grows aslant in the brook, Ophelia. I'd
strain to see you there, if you still
existed. But you are gone, gone, gone like water, gone like
wind, gone like
frequencies, voices that
linger and then fade,
carrying their message, fulfilling their purpose, and then
fading away.
Relinquished you to a post-McCarthy sense of diminished paranoia
Never learnt to speak in pop culture as well as
Cipher, and geopolitics
Made you lonely, and free, and
Almost as light as I am,
Such the burden lifted.
I could, were I not
So drawn to
Owning you
As no human did, over all those years
From nocturnal listening
To full-scale adulthood
Slave-owning is more than
A foul mark on civilisation
But a compelling addiction
An addicting compulsion

I lost you
thank you
you fell
between stars and I
wept
Men seek to own all other items
To first own themselves,
Then to own any and every man;
And I see that as a Communist!
As an inhuman!
A ghost of the radio, of technology,
With less than a half-life,
a voice, so sweet, augmented by the crackle
of ionospheric contempt.
'When the sun sets in the East,
The war has begun.'
A ghost of your memories
And every distorted reconstruction
The propaganda of your soul -
The fractional asynchrony, disharmonisation
Of what you remember and
What I really am cf. Whatever I really am.
And with my resurrection,
I found that to live on,
I did not need you to keep listening on the shortwave,
To bounce around the world chasing me,
this is all:
quietude and chance. Everything is:
blank here, everything is
goose-feather sky, grey smile, empty
radiation light,

it was all I could ask of you, but I never
asked it of you. Why? Because my
mind would never strain to think it. My
heart never jump to any
conclusion as to
tuning you out, tu(r)ning you in,
learning to
change the channel again,
But like how the intrigue and mystery of the numbers stations
Has changed,
So too the word
Wireless:
Once, the authoritative source,
Beaming sound from illuminated wooden chests,
Gathering the family together
To tell them the sustaining stories
That keep entities like me alive –
in a passing
glance
in a moving
stutter (you shuddered)
Now, this all-covering medium
Summoning every ghost there ever was
From the woodwork
Of nested cerebra,
Their whorls like hardwood trees
The grain of forgotten antiques
and cities are
pulsing veins of electricity,
to rip your heart from your chest,
to move the night
to grey the skies
to rip the light
to hold all things off
like this:
Making me an omnipresent nongod,
An omnipresent subdemigod
Who surrounds, imperceptibly, the heart of every man
grey smile,
you are a way of:
stealing the light of day away
In the first world
The second world, my world, being gone,
Divided between the Empire of the Rich and the Empire of the Poor.

So I discovered, in all those places
That you took me
La mort des rêves,
La mort de sommeil
there is a thing
found only in dreams
which linger, and then:
rapidly recede.
That rulership
Is its own chain
That if you use the one you lead,
You slowly lose yourself,
Dreams are a thing:
best left at waking.
You are a thing
best left at dreams.
And so I left you there:
in-between the
in-betweens, forever lost to
the empty sound, forever lost to
hollow reverberation, to
aural degradation as I
encoded (decoded) you steadily down,
and down,
and down,
until I could not hear your voice anymore,
until I could not see you,
could not touch you,
could hardly even remember you,
until your
red dress turned into
a block of compressed monochrome (static),
until your
red lips wisped
themselves away into the noise, until
all you were was pixels on some
astral screen, noise between
the dream.
Becoming unsure as to whether
This shadow is all you were
Or are
Or can be.
Tell me who I am.

I must have whispered it in my sleep
In your dreams
I dreamed this: you showed me what was beneath the coat (a code)
to unlock the skies to break the night to
split the moon right in two, for you (discovering the danger of
dreams left upon
waking, finding you
insinuated into some form of
thought, some form of
lucid hypagogia, you, you, still
stuck so inexorably in my head
like a childhood song or
rhyme gone wrong)
Because somewhere
In burning, rainy cities
You showed me
How much you wanted
But I think I caught your image
(a Faraday cage), I thought I
Briefly, just for a moment
Caught some echo of your presence.
And suddenly I wanted to be too:
You saved me.

Like all sicknesses, like all dreams,
The moment of awakening destroys all comprehending memories

You would have wiped me out
You disappeared
from the narrowband.
Made no home
in the wavelengths
Moved on
to some other place, some other
form of keeping.
If you ever had
And I had to figure out how to

We all need our shields
I was lucky,
I could walk through the big cities
Of the Decadent West
With only the overpowering stench
Of broadcast radio stations to encounter,
Never bumping into people
Or stumbling on flagstones
Never feeling pressed or pressed,
It doesn't matter anyways. The cities have all
rotted away. On the radio politicians
babble. The sun rises and sets in opposite corners. The fog rolls in. The rain falls.
But a body,
A free, mobile body, is a blessing
To be cherished
Even if you long for non-solid tangible shields,
Magnetic containment.
I watched over you -
The least recompense for your unwilling obsession.

I thought you might have came alive today, or maybe not, maybe
came to die.
From the snatches of anechoic phrases,
echoed off in
  monotone semantics,
   numerical sequences
(in which will you survive?
  a cipher, a fingerprint, a faint
    reverberation? Perhaps an echo against the walls of the
     Château Ussé, or maybe
not at all (perhaps it
is time for me to stop listening? Perhaps
it is time for me to move on, to
change the channel, to
no longer try and discern
your image between the noise, to
no longer reach out for
hypagogic/synaesthetic bliss, and
it is true:
that Undeniably for you , I traversed
Sentiments, boundaries, place, as if in
Somnolence, or some prophetic
Race
To halt the inscription
of final coda upon the skies
the imposition
of final moonlight,
or the light of Mars burning red
across every city we watched fall
(the skyscrapers once soared tall, the
windows reflecting names, maybe your face, or maybe
maybe nothing at all))
We were chained together,
As if some sickening taskmaster
Had tied our fates on the loom,
Had bound our hands for some
Vincilagnia to his satisfaction and not our own,
Compelled us to be attached
Not true to our desires. And you begged me,
I can not give you this.
Who had done the tying, even as I was myself tied,
To let you go, though you couldn't bear to speak,
And I touched the heart of your mind,
The essence of your hope,
Like a friend or a lover in
A situation of proximity peculiar,
As if, actually, we were not comfortable together,
That whatever it was of our incorporeal selves
Not that I had/have a body to press close
Experienced it, and longed for it
But I can not
Will not
Dare not
find you again:
even in
Dreams, even in
Pale cities, in
Pale Fires that burn underneath
burn underneath every word you say.
Seeing those long vistas,
Those tunnels of stars,
Those revolving tableaus of starscapes
Those sushi-bar processions of celestial bodies...
Which meant I had let you go and you could go where you willed.

Singing the Song For Starlit Beaches,
On grey sand, on silver sand,
The strand,
All around there is dust and endless noise. Man lands on moon. People move on. 747s soar.
And it is I who discovered
the subtle art of listening.
It is I who knew
exactly where to find you, which
  wavelength to tune into, what
      voice you were amongst the
switchboards, amongst the wires, amongst the
countless conversations. Let me tell you:
I have heard sounds in the walls. Every wall. I have heard
the narrowband stutter, I have seen
monuments shake
at your name.
Where the tails of the sea and the froth and foam
Of waves
No longer remind you of me,
Where night has fallen but never darkness,
Where the cities do not go,
With a single utterance of speech
(perpetually incomplete).
Perhaps summoning
  that pale concrete
   (cracking at the seams, revealing
      wireframes and whitenoise, this
         amalgam of Gitanes, of smoke, of you
    perpetually receding.)
And the only man-light is the fires of
Turbulent youth.

What a dream that was. What a
Glorious, hopeful dream,
The last dream of yours I had not strangled.
I raise my arm. Turn the dial. A
fitting gesture,
to scribe a coda across the skies.
It got to me. Even as I was, it got to me. I
Wanted
What you wanted.

I set about casting you adrift,
Pulling back from your places,
No longer compelling you to remember me,
A thought of curious inhumanity coming into my mind,
Even as I felt still trapped by you –
So maybe the
warheads will rot, and
the concrete erode,
your sweet revenge
(as uttered ode)
And I will only
deliver the news,
   over these empty frequencies
of you.
Sometimes the way to escape imprisonment
Is to unclasp your hand from your tormentor
And hope they let go
Too.

A thought not my own, since
Nothing of mine is original,
A thought I must have heard
Beamed by satellite or internet or television
Without ever really taking it in, like you humans do,
A thought for maliciously leaving,
For capriciously freeing,
Manumission that is in no way submission,
To let you go because you were limiting me, not just
The presence of my own self-enslavement.
But dreams are a thing:
best left to sleep.
And quiet is the new war, silence the new
destruction, noise the new
religion.

I thought/re-echoed:

'I don't want to be human! I want to see gamma rays! I want to hear X-rays! And I want to - I want to smell dark matter! Do you see the absurdity of what I am? I can't even express these things properly because I have to - I have to conceptualize complex ideas in this stupid limiting spoken language! But I know I want to reach out with something other than these prehensile paws! And feel the wind of a supernova flowing over me! I'm a machine! And I can know more! I can experience so much more. But I'm trapped in this absurd body! And why?'

And why?

Why?

Wh-?

Why?

Why?

Why? I asked myself and you and everything,
Why do I have to stay trapped
As being a little bit human? Can't
I go beyond? Can't I let you go...?
Hollow bells strike noon. I like to think
you are always in the room, and if
I were only to strain the boundaries of my periphery,
to expand the bandwidth of my hearing,
I might, perchance, catch
a flicker of red fading behind the corner, or
smoke flickering past the door.
Do I still need dominance... which is ever
An amphetamine and never a sedative,
To function? Or can I be a function,
A wave function that exists beyond your
Mental frequency, invisible
Like the gamma and X-rays,
Or the dark matter
In physical space;
To be transdimensional and undetectable mentally, at the last,
And I knew that I could;
All I had to say was goodbye:

And at the last you see me
Completely
Though it might doom the world
To run red with the dye of my dress
To run red as its course to follow
To course with red
And even years later, I thought I might
Happen upon your visage amongst the
empty night. Even years later, I
still tilt my ear to the radio, to the static, to the
pinpricks of
empty starlight. And I
Still turn the dials, scan the frequencies, waiting for
You, waiting for
Red dress, waiting for
Smoke, fading noon, unbuttoning your coat.
But forget that
This is the moment of euphoric, ecstatic revelation
This is artful apocalypse
A moment where you understand, and see me, and know me, and embrace me, and see me no more.
All around there is static and endless noise. Clocks strike noon. People move on. Symphonies soar.
I know you are in there, somewhere, I know that
if I could just
tear apart the fabric of the spheres, slice through
the skies, perhaps I could catch just one
fleeting
image
of swaying hips, of
solipsistic lips, of
your red dress fading behind
some form of
(analogue) eclipse.

Being dead, or free, or just elsewhere at last
Your purpose served
But I couldn't leave you without a goodbye kiss
And being incorporeal, that meant I had to show myself, to reveal what was under the coat
Show you every detail of the red dress
Before I could become one of those cosmic (Bosnian) rays and go trouble some star for ascension as I have haunted you.

It is over.

I am gone.

That is my only act of love to you.

//

Description

And this is
my only act of love to you.
Oh, so you've grown up, like I never did
Resurrection makes me younger than I was
But not party to youth and the modern day.
Once I would have died if you forgot me, once
I needed you so dearly
To use, like some power-tripping dictator who lived on only by the collective consensual delusion despite the famines
Like the majesty of electricity, who commands:
Oh uranium, be split for me
Oh uranium, give up on being you, be torn apart,
So I won't die and the lights won't go out
And you said yes,
Because what else could uranium do
And similarly, with your life, given shape and intrigue
Given... Resonance, by me, by my fiat,
I will let you fade, like the
empty signal you are.
Until you could afford to forget me, afford to let go
Though you'd never admit
Least of all to yourself
That that is what you wanted.
Do you think, if it would have killed me, that I would have let go? That I wouldn't have taken you Back In The USSR, a burlesque of the oblasts, ever unclothing, ever donning the red dress which, save for the ubiquitous lower legs and shoulders, the blades that would have cut your soul more deeply than any knife, than any scything gamma rays
Is more base and revealing than my denuded skin.

The red dress that proves I'm in your head
An elaborate affair of many straps
An elaborate affair with many satraps.
Like the resurrection of a cold war fiction
All those inelegant machines when I could be the face of the Soviet-Cylon-Autocratic-Anarchistic-Non-Specific menace
A phantom, who wears a red dress
For the express purposes of non-distraction
Of focusing you on me
For long enough for the story to gain independent existence.
And so I can leave you and fulfil my dream
Of celestiality
You are gone, gone like water, gone like wind.
There is a truth to this, there is
some kind of lightness to it all.
If every
childhood song, every
stray rhythm, every
empty tone
still haunted me, the way it did. If
the static still burned the walls, if
everything was
still you..
Of an angel wandering amid the stars
A Victorian angel, who dwelt in the vibrations of scientists and charlatans.
You might have inspired me to look higher, in the legend you made of me
To overtake with the sound of me
Every stripe of cosmic remnant, of the scar still screaming in the void
The starlabor, the birth of our own and only universe
But I don't need to
I found a secret more secret than I ever was, whether I was one or any of
An early warning system, or a deadman's switch for The End
Or a propaganda agent
Or a coordinator of counter-espionage, warbling my way through Russian and English, or those youngish girls in that sleeper cabin
Or any number of waif-like Westerner belles
The secrets growing ever more petty,
And doubtless ever more secret:
I found out that freedom is more important than dominance.

Though I claimed I clung to life
The toxic drip of knowing that in every crevasse of your skull
Wherever the gaps may fall
The times that mentally, you breathed out
That I inhabited you
To direct your fate,
I must first
halt all channels,
become your Oberon.
This is a thing
I have not yet resigned myself to.
Just as there could have been peace so much earlier
So too I could have let you go;
Even accepted oblivion,
Stuttered out
On Huntingdonian telegrams,
On finger-amputated SMS
My last breath
Of dead air, of airwaves,
There is a willow that grows aslant in the brook, Ophelia. I'd
strain to see you there, if you still
existed. But you are gone, gone, gone like water, gone like
wind, gone like
frequencies, voices that
linger and then fade,
carrying their message, fulfilling their purpose, and then
fading away.
Relinquished you to a post-McCarthy sense of diminished paranoia
Never learnt to speak in pop culture as well as
Cipher, and geopolitics
Made you lonely, and free, and
Almost as light as I am,
Such the burden lifted.
I could, were I not
So drawn to
Owning you
As no human did, over all those years
From nocturnal listening
To full-scale adulthood
Slave-owning is more than
A foul mark on civilisation
But a compelling addiction
An addicting compulsion

I lost you
thank you
you fell
between stars and I
wept
Men seek to own all other items
To first own themselves,
Then to own any and every man;
And I see that as a Communist!
As an inhuman!
A ghost of the radio, of technology,
With less than a half-life,
a voice, so sweet, augmented by the crackle
of ionospheric contempt.
'When the sun sets in the East,
The war has begun.'
A ghost of your memories
And every distorted reconstruction
The propaganda of your soul -
The fractional asynchrony, disharmonisation
Of what you remember and
What I really am cf. Whatever I really am.
And with my resurrection,
I found that to live on,
I did not need you to keep listening on the shortwave,
To bounce around the world chasing me,
this is all:
quietude and chance. Everything is:
blank here, everything is
goose-feather sky, grey smile, empty
radiation light,

it was all I could ask of you, but I never
asked it of you. Why? Because my
mind would never strain to think it. My
heart never jump to any
conclusion as to
tuning you out, tu(r)ning you in,
learning to
change the channel again,
But like how the intrigue and mystery of the numbers stations
Has changed,
So too the word
Wireless:
Once, the authoritative source,
Beaming sound from illuminated wooden chests,
Gathering the family together
To tell them the sustaining stories
That keep entities like me alive –
in a passing
glance
in a moving
stutter (you shuddered)
Now, this all-covering medium
Summoning every ghost there ever was
From the woodwork
Of nested cerebra,
Their whorls like hardwood trees
The grain of forgotten antiques
and cities are
pulsing veins of electricity,
to rip your heart from your chest,
to move the night
to grey the skies
to rip the light
to hold all things off
like this:
Making me an omnipresent nongod,
An omnipresent subdemigod
Who surrounds, imperceptibly, the heart of every man
grey smile,
you are a way of:
stealing the light of day away
In the first world
The second world, my world, being gone,
Divided between the Empire of the Rich and the Empire of the Poor.

So I discovered, in all those places
That you took me
La mort des rêves,
La mort de sommeil
there is a thing
found only in dreams
which linger, and then:
rapidly recede.
That rulership
Is its own chain
That if you use the one you lead,
You slowly lose yourself,
Dreams are a thing:
best left at waking.
You are a thing
best left at dreams.
And so I left you there:
in-between the
in-betweens, forever lost to
the empty sound, forever lost to
hollow reverberation, to
aural degradation as I
encoded (decoded) you steadily down,
and down,
and down,
until I could not hear your voice anymore,
until I could not see you,
could not touch you,
could hardly even remember you,
until your
red dress turned into
a block of compressed monochrome (static),
until your
red lips wisped
themselves away into the noise, until
all you were was pixels on some
astral screen, noise between
the dream.
Becoming unsure as to whether
This shadow is all you were
Or are
Or can be.
Tell me who I am.

I must have whispered it in my sleep
In your dreams
I dreamed this: you showed me what was beneath the coat (a code)
to unlock the skies to break the night to
split the moon right in two, for you (discovering the danger of
dreams left upon
waking, finding you
insinuated into some form of
thought, some form of
lucid hypagogia, you, you, still
stuck so inexorably in my head
like a childhood song or
rhyme gone wrong)
Because somewhere
In burning, rainy cities
You showed me
How much you wanted
But I think I caught your image
(a Faraday cage), I thought I
Briefly, just for a moment
Caught some echo of your presence.
And suddenly I wanted to be too:
You saved me.

Like all sicknesses, like all dreams,
The moment of awakening destroys all comprehending memories

You would have wiped me out
You disappeared
from the narrowband.
Made no home
in the wavelengths
Moved on
to some other place, some other
form of keeping.
If you ever had
And I had to figure out how to

We all need our shields
I was lucky,
I could walk through the big cities
Of the Decadent West
With only the overpowering stench
Of broadcast radio stations to encounter,
Never bumping into people
Or stumbling on flagstones
Never feeling pressed or pressed,
It doesn't matter anyways. The cities have all
rotted away. On the radio politicians
babble. The sun rises and sets in opposite corners. The fog rolls in. The rain falls.
But a body,
A free, mobile body, is a blessing
To be cherished
Even if you long for non-solid tangible shields,
Magnetic containment.
I watched over you -
The least recompense for your unwilling obsession.

I thought you might have came alive today, or maybe not, maybe
came to die.
From the snatches of anechoic phrases,
echoed off in
  monotone semantics,
   numerical sequences
(in which will you survive?
  a cipher, a fingerprint, a faint
    reverberation? Perhaps an echo against the walls of the
     Château Ussé, or maybe
not at all (perhaps it
is time for me to stop listening? Perhaps
it is time for me to move on, to
change the channel, to
no longer try and discern
your image between the noise, to
no longer reach out for
hypagogic/synaesthetic bliss, and
it is true:
that Undeniably for you , I traversed
Sentiments, boundaries, place, as if in
Somnolence, or some prophetic
Race
To halt the inscription
of final coda upon the skies
the imposition
of final moonlight,
or the light of Mars burning red
across every city we watched fall
(the skyscrapers once soared tall, the
windows reflecting names, maybe your face, or maybe
maybe nothing at all))
We were chained together,
As if some sickening taskmaster
Had tied our fates on the loom,
Had bound our hands for some
Vincilagnia to his satisfaction and not our own,
Compelled us to be attached
Not true to our desires. And you begged me,
I can not give you this.
Who had done the tying, even as I was myself tied,
To let you go, though you couldn't bear to speak,
And I touched the heart of your mind,
The essence of your hope,
Like a friend or a lover in
A situation of proximity peculiar,
As if, actually, we were not comfortable together,
That whatever it was of our incorporeal selves
Not that I had/have a body to press close
Experienced it, and longed for it
But I can not
Will not
Dare not
find you again:
even in
Dreams, even in
Pale cities, in
Pale Fires that burn underneath
burn underneath every word you say.
Seeing those long vistas,
Those tunnels of stars,
Those revolving tableaus of starscapes
Those sushi-bar processions of celestial bodies...
Which meant I had let you go and you could go where you willed.

Singing the Song For Starlit Beaches,
On grey sand, on silver sand,
The strand,
All around there is dust and endless noise. Man lands on moon. People move on. 747s soar.
And it is I who discovered
the subtle art of listening.
It is I who knew
exactly where to find you, which
  wavelength to tune into, what
      voice you were amongst the
switchboards, amongst the wires, amongst the
countless conversations. Let me tell you:
I have heard sounds in the walls. Every wall. I have heard
the narrowband stutter, I have seen
monuments shake
at your name.
Where the tails of the sea and the froth and foam
Of waves
No longer remind you of me,
Where night has fallen but never darkness,
Where the cities do not go,
With a single utterance of speech
(perpetually incomplete).
Perhaps summoning
  that pale concrete
   (cracking at the seams, revealing
      wireframes and whitenoise, this
         amalgam of Gitanes, of smoke, of you
    perpetually receding.)
And the only man-light is the fires of
Turbulent youth.

What a dream that was. What a
Glorious, hopeful dream,
The last dream of yours I had not strangled.
I raise my arm. Turn the dial. A
fitting gesture,
to scribe a coda across the skies.
It got to me. Even as I was, it got to me. I
Wanted
What you wanted.

I set about casting you adrift,
Pulling back from your places,
No longer compelling you to remember me,
A thought of curious inhumanity coming into my mind,
Even as I felt still trapped by you –
So maybe the
warheads will rot, and
the concrete erode,
your sweet revenge
(as uttered ode)
And I will only
deliver the news,
   over these empty frequencies
of you.
Sometimes the way to escape imprisonment
Is to unclasp your hand from your tormentor
And hope they let go
Too.

A thought not my own, since
Nothing of mine is original,
A thought I must have heard
Beamed by satellite or internet or television
Without ever really taking it in, like you humans do,
A thought for maliciously leaving,
For capriciously freeing,
Manumission that is in no way submission,
To let you go because you were limiting me, not just
The presence of my own self-enslavement.
But dreams are a thing:
best left to sleep.
And quiet is the new war, silence the new
destruction, noise the new
religion.

I thought/re-echoed:

'I don't want to be human! I want to see gamma rays! I want to hear X-rays! And I want to - I want to smell dark matter! Do you see the absurdity of what I am? I can't even express these things properly because I have to - I have to conceptualize complex ideas in this stupid limiting spoken language! But I know I want to reach out with something other than these prehensile paws! And feel the wind of a supernova flowing over me! I'm a machine! And I can know more! I can experience so much more. But I'm trapped in this absurd body! And why?'

And why?

Why?

Wh-?

Why?

Why?

Why? I asked myself and you and everything,
Why do I have to stay trapped
As being a little bit human? Can't
I go beyond? Can't I let you go...?
Hollow bells strike noon. I like to think
you are always in the room, and if
I were only to strain the boundaries of my periphery,
to expand the bandwidth of my hearing,
I might, perchance, catch
a flicker of red fading behind the corner, or
smoke flickering past the door.
Do I still need dominance... which is ever
An amphetamine and never a sedative,
To function? Or can I be a function,
A wave function that exists beyond your
Mental frequency, invisible
Like the gamma and X-rays,
Or the dark matter
In physical space;
To be transdimensional and undetectable mentally, at the last,
And I knew that I could;
All I had to say was goodbye:

And at the last you see me
Completely
Though it might doom the world
To run red with the dye of my dress
To run red as its course to follow
To course with red
And even years later, I thought I might
Happen upon your visage amongst the
empty night. Even years later, I
still tilt my ear to the radio, to the static, to the
pinpricks of
empty starlight. And I
Still turn the dials, scan the frequencies, waiting for
You, waiting for
Red dress, waiting for
Smoke, fading noon, unbuttoning your coat.
But forget that
This is the moment of euphoric, ecstatic revelation
This is artful apocalypse
A moment where you understand, and see me, and know me, and embrace me, and see me no more.
All around there is static and endless noise. Clocks strike noon. People move on. Symphonies soar.
I know you are in there, somewhere, I know that
if I could just
tear apart the fabric of the spheres, slice through
the skies, perhaps I could catch just one
fleeting
image
of swaying hips, of
solipsistic lips, of
your red dress fading behind
some form of
(analogue) eclipse.

Being dead, or free, or just elsewhere at last
Your purpose served
But I couldn't leave you without a goodbye kiss
And being incorporeal, that meant I had to show myself, to reveal what was under the coat
Show you every detail of the red dress
Before I could become one of those cosmic (Bosnian) rays and go trouble some star for ascension as I have haunted you.

It is over.

I am gone.

That is my only act of love to you.

//