Out here the sky is just wider they say The cold is much colder, the dry much drier And the wild is just wilder It will change you without your permission It requires no submission, no admission, this perdition A radio tuner hidden in the mind, it’s knobs twisted An array of antennas listening beyond deep space Turning their wide and wan faces orbitally tracking Scanning the waves littering the unseen landscapes Oscillations becoming piercing poniard rays Thrashing through windows illuminating floating motes of dust Which swirl and dance on eddies of temperate turbulence Stirred by slender slinking feline movements Inspired, disturbed, affected For some the plangent clanging served a steady beacon Crude carillons running roughshod over others Ushering them into the faded rusted yellow cabs Idling at the curbside with an eerie silent sentience Whisking them through the mottled shade and sun Coasting winding jungle roads and into crystal caves Where humming subterranean supercomputers Penetrate and probe their squishy oozing meat brains Entering the nascent nuclei, the recipe released Transcribing the unspeakable sequences unique and holy The hushed clicking of the hard drives locating writable sectors A dull mechanical whirring as the magnetic stripe is encoded Sequential instructions for manual reassembly Operations much too delicate for the clumsy hands of humans Machines of mythology, from the future delivered far into the past To fall into the warm clasp of the mythical mothers’ arms Where the heavenly heartbeat ebbs and throbs Many others merely drifting drab and sullen specters Wandering off the shoulders into the widening expanse A vast and measureless desert to disappear into Lies in wait, a beckoning, a welcoming, an embrace Becoming invisible, unapparent, intangible Veering into vaporous vagabondage Tattered cardboard signs scrawled with scribbled glyphs Indecipherable epigrams, tragic and acutely angular The bells turned to howls, like the roaring of the wind Rippling through riparian ravines and cavernous crypts Under the gaze of eidolic idols weathered and worn Their voice and visage waxen and wan, fuliginous Creeping toward a crusting crepuscular As that which amongst us we choose not to see Chooses in its own turn not to be seen Passing through into the pale purlieu Sleeping at the side of the road with a bundle of blankets Where the tall straight rows of cottonwoods grow Drifting off into sleep eternal and listlessness Beside the ever-burbling bubbling brook Where none but coyotes lap quietly at its jagged egdes Content to doze dazedly dancing into deaths bony embrace Yet others still heard nothing. The sonorous signal never penetrating their consciousness Their lives continuing as they had, patterned and drab Remaining convivially compliant and conformable They roll up the windows in their vehicles when driving past Or turn their heads to not meet the gaze of monsters manifest Fading further with each passing plume of road dust Unacquainted with the rippling undercurrents Their lives remain unchanged by what is unheard As the experience speeds and swerves around them They are the least interesting, the bit part actors Extras in the scene, to simulate a sort of realness The credits roll at closing - their name is not among them A reality we are prone and primed to readily ingest The wheel of fortune spinning, dazzling the guests With glitter and money and fantastic plastic prizes A miniscule pill far too easy to swallow Gulped down with a gasping breath, unbeknownst Unknowingly saved, plucked up by pinching fingers From a fate they would now never know And never understand
A multimedia puzzle-story of an immortal being's struggle to define and exert their will upon a wholly deterministic and ambivalent multiverse, and the strange cult who loves them.
