1. The Smoke
Tell your side of it, red berries.
You’ve seen these gray verticalities
rise and fall over eons with their
demure brothels and pompous lawmen,
haven’t you? Aren’t they always lost?
Respire with me, carbon-reclaiming berries,
breath berries. You keep your secrets,
and no hard feelings. The fell smog
doesn’t need to hear it all.
None of us can see through the gray,
meaning it’s equal footing from the slopes to
the roiling valley. Almost all of us
are lost all our lives.
I ate a mushroom that a
woman in a white hood handed me.
Here’s what the fungus changes.
There was a forest fire buried inside me,
locked, desiccated, and straining
against a jail of needles.
My father once walked in this clearing.
Bereft of all landmarks in this boiling smoke,
I swear by the inferno that
his gaze has been here before.
2. The Wild
Even those stone towers and walls
have not been out here, not for weeks
of walking, anymore. I haven’t
had a use for words since you
and I abandoned them, since we
decided together that the crude sign language
we have adopted would suffice instead,
like how hot urine, steaming in the underbrush,
does not need to be shaken with grenadine and bitters first.
Every once in a while there is an encounter,
like this marauder who sheathed his blades by
our fire, trading spices for our dried fruit,
and leaving no trace by the time the sky was blue again.
Mostly, though, the encounters are enormous,
like this island tortoise that we didn’t realize
had swallowed us, until we had hiked inside its gut for a full day.
“These trees are different, aren’t they, than we
were expecting?” you sign,
and eventually I reply with our sign for
”We have become lost in the belly of a great monster,
a tortoise the size of a mountain.”
This is the opposite of progress, a year of eternities
of unchecked growth, of love with no fire to comb its hair.
3. Hell
It’s not so bad; it still hurts.
The marauder is back.
He found some black clay for war paint
and it helps absorb the rough light,
letting our sharpest blades stay sharp
by sparing them machete duty.
An angel has been standing on that mountain ledge
as we approached. She is being devoured,
calmly. This is happening
over geologic time, but it is happening.
A million ants are swarming all over her
flying-cranes-patterned, red kimono.
Above: an elder dragon wends its way.
Let’s have a bit of a laugh at its disguise,
a flying frog, as though that were fooling anybody.
It must not come this way often.
Frogs can’t fly.
Sorry for the babbling or the brevity here.
The quicker the look, the better.
4. Wyrmlair
Here the whole sky is stone.
I smell the mucus-reek of one of its carvers
around craggy corners.
He smells like dead fish
inside of a horrible whale.
You say you’ll make him sing the blues
he gets too close.
I’m not so sure.
The heat from his lungs is welcome, anyway.
As we approach closer we can hear better.
He is speaking. No, laughing.
Doing impressions, cracking himself up,
spitting rhymes and advice to himself,
thinking over his long plans,
his empire. It shakes me and I fall.
Here we are: the stone door.
A thousand-me could not move it.
As it creaks closed behind us,
we walk faster.
I wish that the Riders in Wind were here.
The blue is bleeding into this gray world.
A lotus is unfolding somewhere, there, in the cavernous dark.
5. Heaven
The music rings forever —
I should interrupt myself and warn that heaven is not exciting
if you aren’t hypnotized yourself — but the music is pretty cool.
That angel is here, the worse for wear, her kingdom come, and
otherwise I would be bored, except that the berries and mushrooms
still are with me, so I built a fire and chatted with my dad, who
had a lewd comment about you. The angel, whose name is Arania, can
sing like a choir, and I dream you are with me, so all this patient
sleeping becomes a chore for the damned.
I have never heard you sing. And now I am dreaming of that, and my
cock is bulging while your voice fills me with stars.
0. The Void
Speak honestly out here.
Lies shrivel and proliferate in
the vacuum, and they can get
over everything. I think we should be all right;
to be sure, I won’t speak.
Are you flexible enough to crawl through these gaps?
That stone universe bore my weight differently.
I haven’t got much to offer besides calm,
so that I radiate,
holding the card of fear to my heart,
holding, and not throwing.
You had to point the storm out to me.
Looks different, all flashing blasts
and no rain,
velocity and violence unperturbed
and lawless.
                                I have a job to do:
I sleep, you pull the card with your conjured-donkey
and say, “He’s sleeping.
Is the Bloat no host, even to sleepers, these days?”
“He isn’t really sleeping,” the voice
of the rotted throat, of the colorless light, says,
and it was true, I was only nine tenths there.
It was an hour’s wait.
You can learn to sleep through almost anything.
Breathe deep,
give your ribs lung-room,
and ignore the pallid face that sniffs your blankets,
and peers through your closed eyelids at you.
I sharpened the sword for the next three days,
and you took pity on me for kindling-duty.
6. The Deep
Who knows what will visit when our lungs finally empty?
The ocean is not its surface and
all around us, schooling as far as the eye can see,
are these scaled creatures with brain-room
for only a single question, each,
yet which form an interrogation when combined,
and we parley at length while the ocean rolls around.
Deep into the dark hours, finally
this floorless ocean and ceilingless sky
anger and begin to play catch with us,
and a great drifter from the ocean ceases its silent listening
and lifts a black claw towards us.
In light of these interruptions, an agreement is quickly reached.
Its terms: the cleaner wrasses will end their strike,
and will apologize to the giant lizards for their unkind words.
The temperature of this universe will increase half a degree,
most of which the ocean will absorb,
as ventilation for Heaven and Hell, which are overheating;
the krakens will slumber for another thousand years,
except for Pike, who continues to enjoy painting more than slumbering,
and except for the one who disturbed us,
which floats, lightning-slain.
And you, finally, will make your own small contribution to this ocean.
The storm begins, the one from the stars,
yours now, dancing like a signal whip,
clearly enjoying its new challenge,
gravity, and its own power.
This objectively minor blessing
beats the tar out of our craft.
We can’t go anywhere, and this storm
lasts longer than the hiking;
it seems to last for months,
until one day the color blue resumes us,
lifting the black blankets aside like a bad dream.