by Ken Babstock
and valley were gone. The fire was gone
too. The hanging ‘because’
was gone too. The men were away
and my heart already dead
and the fairground monkey dead in my mouth.
With the public laboratory already built,
I went ahead and broke ground on the secret
lavatory. From the moon hung
a chain-flush, its handle grip glazed
bone and the fairground
screams went out over low frequencies.
July 29, 1982, at 11:35, descending into Novy Urengoy in wind.
Those who died already, so scared
in the toilet, will have to ask,
What is meat made from?
What is a buried boy made from?
Isn’t the same meat in the toilet the other
dead thought buried in ‘am good’?
No formal consensus could be reached
beyond all resource amassing
in the fantasies of a few
hobbyist watchers of the night’s gridded picture book.
I divest of goods: the malware and copper coil,
the hose, gasket and valve.
Nizhnavartovsk, June, 1982, altitude between 3400 and 3600 m. Rain.
Please come here. Please. I played with a dream
in a mirror and many many thousands
of birds
which are not real. Are not here.
I don’t like it here anymore. Good
people don’t open doors on the present.
I can’t see how this same trail
descends. Please come at least
halfway and I’ll fall
down into the laws of the present,
into fungal infections and
coital cephalgia which is constant surveillance.
At 10:41, June 7, 1984, during routine descent into Orsk. No wind.
I only dreamt it – people for money –
I don’t want to leave
the old voices. Little babies
for money. Weird fish for money.
The old voices interest us only for
biting. What is an achievement of scale?
To have heard all speech in the nutmeat
on the boar’s breath.
A label card in the file drawer’s
window. Speech is fact, with interest.
The holly is polysynthetic blisters and no signal.
A sine wave of pricks but no signal.
Approaching Perm. Altitude unreported. 1985. Tailwinds.
Too strangely the birds jerk their scales.
The one who sits in the office
dreamt of birds a lot,
living for butterflies, and for pricks
a lot, too. If only today
were really quite small. Still, the pricks
need their snack. Between Identity and Supremacy
opens a surplus of negative affect. Either
you erase me now or I’ll enlarge it.
Look what they make you give.
A pointless radar of care for the slug ascending.
A reader’s migraine with your head thrown back.
June 13, 1985, at 10:01, in cloud above Rubtsovsk. Unconfirmed.
Do lightweight people have a head?
Put eyes on the neck
and these questions peel
along a garden of hair. You, morning,
love a stranger. Not everyone can be
the same, but you love a stranger
and opened your mouth to him
under the beech, the elm, under the oak
trading human and arboreal
fungi. The excess space junk making
prayer beads of morning’s screaming
party. Cycling bandits fanning the treeline.
09:25 (local time), June 18, 1986, at 3800 m, Rostov on Don.
All good possibles come from above.
It was lying there,
different again from the wallpaper,
again from what the one in Vienna
will be. It wasn’t dead, ‘I am
still fresh.’ All good possibles come
from above, moreover the elms and beech
scream into their crowns, tiara of young
bangers, blank, half-frozen air
crystalizing in the strata. Some good possibles
heat up with the tinned beans
over a twig fire. God eats as comms come in.
09:05. Mist. Strezhevoy.
When a stranger comes along, ill, with
a dirty foot, perhaps running
the card back again
will get you more water. A lump of sugar.
I can only read out what we
get back. I want to travel home already,
the darker band between stars,
the chewed console,
the boar’s shadow spanning the fence-
gap. Does the bandit still watch
you every day in the controlled city?
When I smell that mind I want home.
West of Syktyvkar, June 26, 1986. Light aircraft.
A middle-sized giant came along
who wanted to thump me. The birds
ranted a lot. The boys invited
morning to be a fixed ladder. Not the big one.
I must climb over it, sadly.
But I do want to have you,
for he seems to conceive the slightest
contact as licence to think down in.
I hit it with a maul.
Or I slept under a desk
dreaming the forest’s elbows were salmon
and the ice thawed. Because you involved me.
June 30, 1988, 08:40, after taking off from Samara. Multiple incidents.
And it is evening already, so swollen.
Suppose one rips up the blue, one takes
away the quiet, the pealing
in the ears, and is ashamed of something.
No, but … There … I have just thrown
the feeling into your mouth. Now you tell it.
Perhaps you truly don’t own it but it’s
in your mouth now so take it
for a walk
past radomes, damask, reel-to-reel,
the analysts of Virginia under
whatever vector this year’s probe is re-entering on.
May 3, 1989, at 08:20, not far from Tyumen. Altitude unknown at time of incident.
People. People. That means the humans.
Humans cannot take away the red sky
once it is cooked. If you
take away the calling in his room,
the angels of swollen evening, the swollen
evening, you cannot then say, ‘I milked her there.’
Perhaps shame at the summit is fitting.
Perhaps thinking is a moon’s moon.
Perhaps the frozen coward’s bucket
will react at the molecular – Ah,
mammalian ultra. MDMAlien light source.
Indigo bunting. Tickertape, kill sites and bunting.
May 10, 1989, 07:15, Tarnosky Gorodok. Damage to windscreen.
My mouth keeps on springing open, forced
to wait for its flesh.
What the big people are taking
from the baked moon and the forest
disturbed my sleep quite a bit. Quite a bit. No?
I can buy you, you ape!
Tremors from Germania in the mountain’s
root, the aerial quivers. Correspondent,
dressmaker to the orange Lord,
I remember you from the party.
You spat in a plastic cup.
You were a plastic cup and waxed string.
May 13, 1989, 06:00, while holding at 4000 m over Ulyanorsk.
Now I can take this to Shiverbeard.
Is the sky lovely? Are there none at our house
we can buy so the morning
is poor again? Someone made
hello in the can.
You can marry every third woe in sleep.
You can think all the strange princes
but the forest and city have a sovereign
and you were born a soap dish.
Dome on the berm over the wreck. With flowers.
They knew we could hear yet they
carried on in civilian dress, fingering
the fibre optics. Feeding the sea floor some light.
May 20, 1990, at 05:20 (Local Time), a light aircraft 3 miles out of Voronezh.
Outside stand two sheep.
‘Ought’ guards the sheep.
‘Perhaps’ shakes the little tree.
A little dog with a rod falls off.
If the accursed spikes buy enough for next year
the black sheep comes and bites it.
When he hunts, he thumps a dog.
When he hunts, he thumps a dog.
When he thumps, he hunts a dog.
It is raining here in the room.
What gets learned from all this listening?
The bagheads in coveralls with their electrocuted parts.
04:35, May, altitude unknown, nearing Varna. Clear.
A pretzel? No. An apple? Better. A brick?!
It would seem the most extremely
heightened anticipation appears
to diminish the capacity to imagine, which descends
ever deeper, it despairs of coming up
with a worthy object. Are you putting
it into outer space?
I’m sitting on it.
Are you recycling it?
I’m repurposing myself.
The brightest stars are the knowledge industry.
Our bodies’ bodies on the moon’s moon.
May 26, 1990, 02:40, at 3300 m, circling Wroclaw.
Now I am good.
As I woke up today crying, a dog came.
The red books painted the ground
where the apes are, where the fishes
are. Now none is coming.
In the room we say ‘image boar’;
whether we’re crying or going,
we now always say ‘image boar.’
I don’t like going.
The room is spoilt. I am good now.
May I eat that?
May I eat all of those? Now I am good.
May 29, 1991, 01:01, Zielona-Gora, approaching the frontier, altitude unreported.
First imply the distant blue idea
to please. Place objects
of magnitude too close in space, in fact
obtruding, not because
colour remains indistinct, and with it
our clothes, the eye upon
which fancy tops out at misty. That bound-
looking mountain.
Were it conscious, all mind a conceivable
horizon.
Between interests lie objects. Imagine lying
between
adventures – a strain in the interim. Reach hopes
to circle or descry rivers drawn from new air,
selves our feelings lose, it carried them out
beyond far, beyond
stretching a rarified husk into grossness. Expanded,
their husk
brightens to mould. Ethereal sky turning
beauty
a more borrowed tincture. Before refined
drink
we hovered, objects nothing could sweep from the brink
of existence.
Thin, dull landscape. Dull sight. We fade
into the
known shapes of space, a hazy good tinged
with prospects
of more fear. Charming. Fear
beyond knowledge reaches for sense, and places
whatever
pieces of its fancy out on a discernible bandwidth
of leisure. The moment presents as but a spot.
And all
claims of ownership brooding over its own
passion
get stamped with an image of the spread-out lord.
Infinite image. Distant space borders
on an object because
one confined boy touches a mouldy I.
We lived
within range of whose sight? Sight range
blending blue
hills into another setting of tempted eyes.
A long wander
into a last project. Put in an execution.
We projected our approach
onto glimmerings, onto shapes found woven through
huge, discoloured (in parts) heaps. Earth, I learnt,
lumped
her unvisited dream in with the disturbed; to leave
was to dream of Yarrow.
• • • • •
To distance the effects of time, place has effected
distance
in a colour. As the future is not a fancy colour,
so the prospect
of its thinking is not a good effacement of memory.
Even form
stings. Certain sorrows still take a period after pain.
We thought medium passion steeped often
in our ‘original essence’ might prove all that remained
of the mould.
Who wished them only impressions in the blue mould.
Never to have been is the untried ascent. What is unsightly
masses before us,
our rude past resumed under present power. Experience
enhances deception
in the cloud. The cloud rests with its golden eye
in our heads,
passing our fancy clothes over both sides
of a barren purple light.
Thus is there both existence and Heaven’s end,
a stream of good humans speaking to a tendency
in the mind,
according to which objects borne of imperceptible
objects
float on a rock: voyage of ‘as though’ through a strong
life rebuffed.
Men heavy with affairs as tidal sands quicken the
means by which sales of the aspirant soul find less
rest,
less wreck, fragments torn from an entirely scattered
port of being. Port of being adrift. All relation
a port
of affection and the will toward instantaneous deed.
We remove circumstance and get unwelcome recoil,
move mind’s port
of pressure and it grasps its elasticity, unites ports
of recovery with
ports of good image configuration. Which reflection
owns nature? From their perspective distant
is interchangeable with blue,
the meanest years enlarged, countless incidents
of ghosted indignity
become most broken when broken alone. Painful
interest in collections
of objects – they unexpectedly soften. To soothe
over time.
Old mind, what scenes appear as startling leaf-puzzle,
down there on your back.
Within it, what leaps toward creation. The long
revival of space as intermediate cling wrap. Try
fondling an impression. All that blue unaware
of us then.
They imposed a truth not on us but on our wish
that delusion always increase in cunning, by which
we meant pretending to quaintness.
Moments were not particles, we were to be
what time
overcame even in advance of our lives, and all
that has since
been annihilated. Again the little ‘almost’ is not
glimmering.
The rivets and hangings and beatings in the distance
our attention
finds intervals for, called clouds, separating our ‘it is’
from ‘it is that.’
<
br /> All this excited trembling coiled at the boundary,
curled on the breast of the great gap – pudder,
pudder – a mighty
contrast between regret and desiring the soft
infinite. It is
arms extinguishing arms halfway to then
that changes
a giant’s fabric; recall the lift in strength as the giant’s
shadowy affections built it a base in the desert.
Most contemplation
looks over existence at the map’s verge, where sea
bends a satellite’s treadmark.
We youth journey early so apprehension is that life,
that eager hood our pursuits put on a man
straining for sight,
sliding on staged flowers to a hole, striving
to gather
the hood into a toy of pleased thoughtlessness.
• • • • •
Yes, I am drawn to war, the unlocked memory
on my back in a casket.
The infant brain is still, confronted with a blue
sky. Scenes of wandering
dyes, faded from sense, a new me
upon which fresher,
richer colours put out my eyes, a bright
dream of starting out