I. Binary

1. exceeding

It was ambiguity that imparted to us the shades of the rainbow,
the divination of infinite colors,
striking through as a stream from what the light is:
pure, white, and as you would often declare, boring.
Freedom was the name others gave
to our notion of confinement,
to the concept of being less free than we were.

You proclaimed that your intentions were being befuddled,
misinterpreted, and even distorted by my theorizing,
by my over-intellectualizing of facts that
you preferred to be arcane, mysterious, unfathomable.

0. complexity

In the time which was unnumbered, not kept track of
by the vibrations of cesium atoms,
nor by the traveling of the sun's shadow,
it was a space and a dimension
not constrained by imagination,
and it was this time we shared,
as if we were, ourselves,
defined by imaginary numbers,
and the mathematicians of time perceptible
could comprehend not our very constitution.

While even a frail solipsistic argument could keep me
firmly rooted in 'normal' reality, you were charmed
by the destruction of rules, and even reality itself,
for rules, you said, particularly the most arbitrary among them,
were little more than the whistling in the dark
of those who were not at ease with ambiguity.
And reality?
Well, to you, reality was an irksome stimulus to be tolerated,
rather than an existence to be savored.

II. Octal

4. Excursion

i think i saw a sign for Barstow...
by the by, why are we going out this far?
oh, yes, i remember now, it was purely an act of spontaneity.
you always said that i needed to be more amorphous of thought,
and yet i'm a terrible chess player. my thoughts, you said,
though organized, are not forward looking.

1. Rift

anyway, this winnowing was the scattering of
our minds, of some intangible form of mental mass.
gravitational, inertial, it makes no difference,
since the difference is only theoretical anyway.

6.

in one month, the first since
last we spoke,
i made more friends than
the year previous.

2. Measurement

i felt the waves crash on the shore of the beach last night.
and i thought i heard the distance (quantified, spelled out in
an exact and finite number) to the point from which we divided. i heard
your presence,
in a dream.

5. Retort

i prefer to hover here, the only one among us
capable of not flying forward,
but you make these names like they were shameful,
like nostalgist is the worst insult you could muster;
like hummingbird is as base a reproach as knuckle dragger.

7. Farewell

but the waves fall on distant shores, now,
perhaps even evoking a smile on your lips,
which, for the life of me, i cannot see.

0. Diversion

in the third year after the scattering,
or the winnowing of our seeds,
subtle levels of intricacy made themselves clearer to me,
like the sudden cognizance of a stereogram,
or a simple vase becoming two faces. you were a kindred spirit,
or at least that's what i convinced myself that you were,
but this is all tangential, the lines of our paths intersecting,
where we met for an instant,
exactly at one point, of the same mind,
but veered off, never to return together again.

3. Playground

skip lightly, now, along the enigmatic grasses
which we once called our thought-stomping grounds,
where we rarely tried to stab one another with quick wit
or bladed tongues in the realms of ethics or philosophy.
but you were always adept at cornering me in my logical inconsistencies,
pummeling me with doublethink, using logic against logic,
repudiating subjective truth while laying claim to it.

III. Decimal

4. Spectroscopy II

The stars below
were known and located,
each according to their street names
and symbolic renderings.


9. Pulsars

Afloat on the sea of
the ether, wending and flowing through the vast emptiness
that we could contain in our eyes but hardly encompass with imagination,
are the ancient hollow voices of millisecond rattlings,
each tuned to a specific and unique frequency.

The symphony of collapsed and
wildly spinning stars sings to me in my dreams.


8. Torus

A ring of water,
ageless,
flowing,
and insidiously stable
was the delineation point,
the location from which we diverted.


2. Spectroscopy I

The stars above
were known and located,
each according to their spectrum
and fluctuations.


0. Levity

We fled
to the hills
and the mountains
to be nearer to God.


7. Singularity

(a microscopic dot, twinkling on an endless floor,
and consumed, brighter as falling through friction-filled sky.)

Watch my eyes gaze downward, burn through under cloak of darkness,
and crumble into a handful of dust,
leaving behind only strobed afterimages
following your glance;
your longing eyes swimming in the soul of another.


5. Corrosion

You reached down
to the ground
below us,
and showed me Eliot's fear;
a handful of dust.
Without words, I understood.


3. Rotation

I gazed up above the winding star-dragon,
saw the crooked W of Cassiopeia
and the cooling faithful ember of an ancient explosion,
instantly, the bowl of the sky overturned,
spilling out stars over the countryside below.


1. The Vision Quest

You pulled me along,
up to the most distant hill we could spy from your rooftop.
Night fell. You broke silence.
I can't remember your words,
but I remember the constellations mapped out for us;
Arabic, Western, Chinese, the zodiac curled and writhed above us.
I think you wanted to show me Cassiopeia.


6. Gravity

I
was
dis-
carded
by
you;
cast
down
like
the
first
stone
at
a
whore.

IV. Hexadecimal

8. Tilling
Plow me under with your words, sharp as paper
and solid as space-age plastics.


3. Paths

What you want is the motion,
the rusted needles pinching into
my fallen-asleep mind. As I struggle for wakefulness,
I need you to pull me along your route,
into the turbid and sodden chaos
that seethes inside your boarded and splintered windows;
your filth-brown eyes.


B. Arcs

Flickers of light over the edges of
tincan metal and breath
held tight like an old worn babydoll.
You speak to me in the vibration
of three hundred cc's of internal combustion,
and deny the voice of my fear.


1. Calendars

Timelines and charts filled with names and pages
and pages and pages and pages
of meaningless numbers will drain me away,
will draw the blood from my veins,
and the vigor from my body,
leaving me cold and useless
as gristle. But you will chew
the sinew and the bone, extracting
the marrow, the last vestiges of myself,
slipping your conical canines
into my arteries, sucking out
the clotted mass of memory.


E. Archival

Retrieve these promises and the lies
which I believed
and the whispered oaths of true love,
that you may lavish them upon another.


7. Carapace

My flesh hardened, and my mind became
exoskeletal, and your teeth, pure as the driven
snow are my path and my protection. Smile for me
once, that I may know your hope for me, that I may know
the silken touch of a metaphysical breeze
washing through my eyes.


C. Lights

A faint lavender glow envelops me here, the memory
burning my tongue like the words I've lied to you.

Your prayers may be enough to retain me,
perhaps even enough to detain me

indefinitely, if not for the shallow breathing pattern
of your quick-timed choppy speech, muttering
Our Father,
whose art is heaven,
hollow be my name.
Give me that which I seek,
and bestow upon me
the filth that I long so to wallow in...


A.

You support yourself with an external casing
of lightweight carbon-metal alloys,
letting it pull you along on an old motorcycle,
art-deco green with a tincan sidecar,
proximate to a night stained beach (beyond your field of vision,
but you know it is there, just the same),
your border of flowing crashing blue-gray satin
meeting the shore of black iron filings
meeting the nadir of the shadow-chromed sky.


5. Shade

Your exhausted hands pull me over the edge
from one microscopically and infinitesimally different purpose
to another.


2. Prayer

In the space of the reel, filmed over
with the breath of the lotus flowers,
with the scent of sleep itself, pulling
distortions into memories,
you, my dreams and my vitality
will call into the darting eyes and jarring mind
a hope and a promise and a bargain
for what you want from me.


D. Contents

Within these words are your own undoing,
the running rushing along in the fabled waters
of feigned normalcy and the tight quivering
muscles of your legs, straining against the current.


6. Sculptures

You pulled me from the lie that surrounded me,
and bore me into what you named to be truth
(a defenseless position from the standpoint of ridicule),
cleaving away the falsehood and bringing me to light,
but you are no god, and your power over me
was my own foolish choice. A body, skinless
(but all that is true of someone is their mind
and their heart, you said), is open to infection.


4. Channels

Inside the arteries of the rusted soul,
windowless and sane, flows a tide
with a torrent of words and dried leaves,
gone brown like your eyes and brittle like your exhausted hands.


9. Rotate

The stylus of simple breath
and the wide flung cliffs of solid things
were anathema to you,
as your arms reached out,
and just a little back,
to grasp with a full body embrace
things as intangible as higher and lower.
Force me, in my brash immature nature
to fit into your round holes and your fettered fantasy.


F. Coda

The grand structure of the fable,
the cautionary tale,
the myth,
the legend,
the silent whisper of the last exhaled breath,
were all contained in the first
wholly gratuitous and perverse act.
I could see it
in the way you turned the key for your apartment,
I could see it
in the combination of the padlock on your jewelry case,
I could see it
in the simple phrases you said,

the words that threatened me with
the end which would be inevitable,
hazy utterances pulled out of restless sleep,
the words of happier songs,
but all the time knowing
how the end would be.


0.

The mountains erode anyway, you said,
and fall into the sea regardless of our faith.

Timothy A. Clark
1997