Tuesday, March 22, 2011

Delusion Altitude, 35,000ft

I.

I'd promised to wave at St. Louis as I passed overhead,

so I crane as we zoom through the timeless twilight of morning

and waggle a few digits at the bright slick

poised at the confluence of Mississippi and Missouri Rivers.


Metallic, it undulates, an amoeba

with twinkling cilia tickling the dark waters.

Odd chunks of jewel intersect it at even intervals,

as if some sloppy god bred pond scum and gems,

and splattered them in a dank nook

to ferment, lovely, floating on nothing,

fed by the breeze blown by my dark hand above.


II.

How meta, I thought, to write the word turbulence

while the sky tossed this machine about its metal self.

Left hand to right, cirrus to nimbus to moonbeam

it juggles our lives and our luggage, with talent, admittedly.


Concurrent with prayer, I imagined I'd blaspheme

when foreseen malfunction came to pass,

when fuselage shattered, scattering roller-boards,

screaming, these fools and I, silent, into altitude.


I imagined regaining consciousness among debris, plummeting

below fiery Plieades, between jagged shrapnel and flaming hands waving.

How deftly I would glide, limbs spread, flannel aflutter,

towards some body of water, discerned from the land that cupped it.

How wisely I would blade my body, knife into the skin of the water–

solid at such speed– and sup of the sanguine splash my form lifts up.


III.

In this moment I notice my asshole,

clenched to preempt catastrophe,

my lungs squeezing stolen oxygen

across cheesecloth and into some mechanism

that transports it to aorta, which disperses

the stuff corporeally, as per usual.



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