Classic Poem

Many of you out there
will have encountered a world of calamity and ruin
with one last gasp at the end of it
and clearly labelled the instructions:
“this Day the Suprise Transport”
“port Saild from this”
and so on.
Not on our planet
yet still
that destination lingers –
terminus,
“animae viles, a sort of
excrementitious mass, that could be projected,
and accordingly was projected – ”
as detritus, cast “from the depth of a shipwreck”
floundering in the blast of an abandoned broadcast –
“Sudden effluvial aftermath here. Have encountered
daze without number...” – doomed
emission, vast dump “which departs from itself”
as a wheezed, unavoidable, looming
exhalation – insidious galactic bloom
whose drift is a swift mutation aboard that
soundtrack lumbering in the background,
strange clank or muffled boom
heralding a dank impending cloudbank possibly
or black-and-white photograph taken on the moon,
featuring I, quaint blip,
feinted relic ’mid dim reverberations
e.g. ghost in portalled tomb
whose blundered destination
plunges on – old death throes
rattle in the deep,
where the dice cup heaves up sleep I’m leaving.

Denizens, sensitive as always, I remain
captain of the spaceship

“Isle of Destolation”
creepily dotted about my photo – where it roams,
approximations of despair breathing malice
pass by in the wake of an interest
I no longer maintain, who fondly recall
how to comb myself and shave my hair
and park my coat and hat in the hall.
Sincerely I resemble all those
who have written to me with letters of condolence,
whether edifice or orifice, bit or whole.
“Though alien drones and foreign hums
within me thrive... ”
strange feeling of sudden distinction was creeping upon me
convinced of its authenticity,

spurting up like a hideous gas
and the whole mass imploding
into its own brief fumes.

Oddly,
I began my radio career
as a swarm of bees.

Some still speak of it
and I go on and on about it,
as befits my condition.
For example, this transmission explains
why someone of approximately my own
age and intelligence suddenly
led me across the large laboratory,
Firkon, Zuhl and the others all following.
Frankly I could have disintegrated
in a pilot’s suit of the same style
“whereby hangs
an immense bridge”
chomping away at the background

as we reached the platform.
Firkon suggested looking down into the elevator shaft
“Notice anything? ”
and when I did, saw three
more floors or deck
levels below.
“At each level
a bridge or balcony...”

projected into the shaft contra-indicating the gap
dome of saucer
between
“analogy of the abyss”
and his tautology
hovered outrageously above it.
“We use rudder-post technology to detach the post and
reinser it on a short staff carried by a frame –
Welcome, 260 thousand cubic centimetres.”

At once, I clambered aboard and found
that taste of his butthole strangely hypnotic
whine of the motor gained in pitch like a twanging ’cello string.
Spike took up the “How long must I wait? I mean – ”
...
A tremor ran through the hull of the Moonraker...
A pencil fell from the instrument ta...
“I – I’m not sure...

Always together in this darned silence,
midground hard to determine between

both and neither,
column and house.”

(I could see right away what these things had in common:
they were all crap. I decided to demonstrate this
by tying strings between various objects.)

“My first
close-up
shot of the moon
filled me with cold foreboding”
– i.e.
stillness, a lack
of “Thank you”
amid the harsh glare of remnants,
bright greys and sooty
blacks,

the jagged,
razor-sharp outlines of the crags –

and no living thing but me,
crater.

“I? But I am an expert! I have so much to discover!
My ‘shallow cell’ theory – ”

a twelve-foot cylinder mounted on two
pairs of caterpillar tracks

glanced to the left, in the direction of the pit.
From this I could disappear into a narrow, walled valley several miles away.
Suddenly,

there I was, ethereal vapour
trails cut deep between the intermittent static
dispatched amid stygian fumes
his only glue
then split.