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!

Lack of Dawn

How we used to breathe starlight,
because I imagined there were no
clouds overhead: each cloud was
every exhalation of how this night
fails to end, how I keep dreaming
of a comet that would not fall
for me. Each dream counts the
number of breakfasts I’ve missed
and the number of swords I eat
during dinner; I counted ten
to completion, to end all wounds.
See: all I did was to feed myself
waiting for the sun to rise on set.

The Immiscibility of Cosmic Regrets

Between us, the brane that
makes universes parallel.
What is perpendicular: pain
if we ever intersect. Your foot
pressed on my stomach is an
allegory for rejection, and up
for it: more unloved things
aside from me; Or geometry
where two points make no line;
The star that failed to shine.
As constellations, we are near
on paper. In paper you blazed
like an unwanted poem you
& I line break. & I felt cold.

Circular Arguments For Spiral Despair

Determinism is true. See:
All events from the start
end in us not fated to be.
I placed it at knifepoint
just to cry at the impossible:
Somewhere in the Ming
you were sipping wine.
In 30s Shanghai, I drank
to serve men. Always
a disservice to myself.
Servicing these timelines,
they turn into a square, an
opposition. Stars aligning
into queues into spirals
into nadir into breaths
of what has always been.
Somewhere in here I died
during the war. Somewhere
was a place we never met.

Swallow

Words she took out of my mouth,
she wrote a poem; Found the moon.
I take back what I said about her:
You Gorgon, with a bite you created
the Crescent. If that is not beauty,
there is still the phrase about phases:
On your face, figurative expressions-
All frightening the cores of stars,
showering praise as I cried the night.
A lump in my throat turned to stone.
Which was hard. Difficult to love.
Love too difficult, gravity too easy.

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.

Post

To be lost in the city, there is a need

to be found. Turn on GPS –

There is no button to mark yourself as safe.

The Assistant says, “The traffic is safe,”

you are insignificant on the map. The party is

a beer and a stranger’s unauthorized arm away.

The Assistant has none of that, so it bosses you

around the map. The high school friend you knew

is at the party and in past tense. Knowing them is a

tense continuity. The Assistant knows present grammar.

The Assistant is remote yet takes control. No stars since

you fell from the sky, a graying dot on milky roadways.

Lights clubbing at your shine, you control filters that

have been filtered for you. The Assistant ensures that

it is safe. That your friend lives in the future.

That they will send a card in a scroll.

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.