10/08/2024

Take me past the edge / I want to see the other side

– Sleep Token, “The Summoning” (2023)

Pisces is the sign of the cosmic ocean. Literal spacetime is largely transparent as Physics informs us. This is why spacetime is inky-dark, as opposed to cloudy-white. Pisces is a diffuse, dark sea with streams of light in every direction. Pisces is the encompassing of every star being its own dust, sparkling into the black glass that is spacetime. Scorpio is the sign of the deep depths. We are reminded of the abyssal or benthic zones. In these waters no light enters at all, and creatures that are adapted to pitch-black darkness lurk. Scorpio is dark, mysterious, and opaque in that light cannot enter its depths. Scorpio is about the layered conditions of crushing pressures, the evasion of senses and knowledge. When you place both signs together by the statistical chaos of astrological birth charts, what a person that results.

We have both the transparent and the opaque, the deep and the diffuse. The possibility of so much light flowing outwards to illuminate the vast pockets of interstellar and intergalactic spaces, and the raging conditions of depths so dark that they are impervious to the gatekeepers of knowing — proof, evidence, examination. To fill such wide spaces, like primordial hydrogen and helium expanding outwards, from the birth of this universe to the present. Physics remind us that the universe is characterized by massive voids. Across voids, the flows of billions of galaxies in web-like structures known as filaments. Pisces is the oldest astrological sign — so old, you can almost see how watery and material time can be, observed as the evolution of cosmic sprawl. So old, Pisces harbors so much potential for renewal, to be young and dizzying and fazed with childlike wonder. Across the sprawl, pockets of intensity lurk where people least expect, containing nothing. Or, nothing but matter. Nothing but hypotheticals and placeholders for contexts difficult to express or describe — dark matter, dark energy. The realm of scorpions that can only felt, barely deciphered by mathematics. For all their darkness, they are indeed there.

This cosmic ocean coupled with opaque layers of darkness, all turbulent and collected within a person. Oh, drown me in all the darkness, all the wanting, all that I can barely know but feel!

No End to Start

(after Marylyn Tan’s ‘re: origin story / ARCHETYPAL EVIL’)

Being immortal is being
sated about being salted
in cycles – day and night
the pry and shut of eyes.
Once, Ah Kong was young
and fleshed out, peachy
with beginnings. A fool,
not knowing that fruiting
is the end, or figurative –
how time is tried, tested
as a painter being tired
of the biggest canvas.
Not the cosmos, but in
housing a weary start.

*Ah Kong: Romanization of the Chinese noun “阿公”, meaning Grandfather.

Murphy’s Law for Interstellar Fissures

One night, I swallowed a planet.
Two moons later, a wrong word
shifted a wormhole via bad praxis.
Using language as a fork for soup:
these tears I stippled on my cheeks
where they should be rolling down.
Another night of failed application.
When you deconstruct my apologies
in a black hole, all sentiment is lost
like the wormhole above. Speaking,
when I cannot hear myself in space.
It’s not like you heard, or replied.

REPERCUSSIONS TO THE SUNK COST FALLACY OF BEING IN AWE

Dreaming of the depths I knew
my name: a left radical sharing
what’s inside the Chinese rain.
Much deeper, was the universe
in a stroke. Haemorrhaging left
galaxies. Blake’s Tyger left alone.
Like Medusa, sculpted in their prime
and indivisible. The Artist measures
them in the thunderstorm, struck alive
via negativa into a vignette. At Marina
I shot the horizon a glance. It drank a
cordial distance, swallowing the deep
again, killing a star. We let that sink
for millennia, carving marble into shatters.

This Passage Spans 13.7 Billion Light-Years

In the grand schemata, you are words in this stanza. In your grand scheme, there is nothing so cosmic like the flings on your strings. If I were flung carelessly like a star across light-years it would be the pinnacle of a civilization. Most don’t go this far however, although you did. You went beyond the end of this piece. Outside the observable universe. Leaving the interior dark. I still shine, casting shadows over what you did.

Moonface

The Sea of Fecundity is acne from an eternity of puberty. The dark side is always covered by hair. Acne erupts in a forest, unseen. There is no face without hair. There were phases without hair. They still insist on long hair being a phase. Being new was supposed to be the absence of a phase. Being new is being unable to face having no face. Especially without hair. Gibbous curls shift in an eclipse of a hundred years and everyone watches. An oblique profile. Picture it. Eclipses are a return to hiding. To be full of courage for one night a month only. To phase out every other day. To be up every night. To return to light pollution as home. To smile or frown without eyes to see yourself. To see eternity as a phase.

Listening Post

When the city is too small
for the heart, a walk in a bar is
travelling the horizon of the moon.
Each crater a landmark of progress
but in the same shade that is
unreliable since you circumvented
twice. If craters were large enough to
contain our warmth the universe
compensates by echoing loneliness –
Still, no one can hear the moaning
or the smell the alcohol that clogs
the futility of memory, the taste of
names that spill off your glass onto
the lunar soil. The next civilization
will question the evidence, likewise
aching for why aren’t there more.

Off-Hours

An empty room jostling with space,
lit by the city and the stars.
Brubeck and his quartet taking five
minutes of contemplation,
thoughts freeing thoughts
to construct using constraints.
Fingers glinting under moonlight
like your bones against darkness,
solace rewriting time signatures
from metronome interiors.
Midnight transcended,
smiles escape windows
to become light pollution.
Walls will reverberate
emotions singing in the shower.
Silence returns as a lover,
whispering sweet nothings,
listening to how
you are static.

Areciboes

Time is a train I keep missing, my
ears plugged into interstellar nadir,
waiting for any radio signal, waiting
for music not my own, someone
out there to collect me to find me
in a universe of abandoned cities filled
with bartending algorithms to serve
beers and not people. Now I have a glass
of poison that warms skin and toys with
hearts, its froth glittering like civilizations –
Even if we too stopped blinking surely machines
will evolve to pilot a train to send me anywhere
but home and warm bodies, and time will tell
everything we don’t have the answers for, like
when will love be a star that isn’t so far away.