Monstrosity

MERCURIUS WEATHERING TIME

Through the chattering teeth
In the shiny wetness of the glottis
Or with the opening of the shuttering eye
See circus lights and albino phantoms cross the eye
Quickening, slowing time,
Weathering
According to their intent.
This place,
The afterbirth of a new race
Our offspring and our replacements
Who sit on our loins and couple with us
Delivering us elsewhere.

Through the chattering teeth
Through the shut shut shutter op open
It's an eye
In the shiny wetness of the glottis
Of the Great One
In the Great One's eye,
See elsewhere
The jissom of a new race,
As full of life as we were full of death
Curled in suspension like bloodthirsty acorns.

Flashing eye shutters
To an open air circus
Where the spangled are frozen by the snowing winds
Burned by the sun
Stung by insects and nettles
Drowned by rain
Struck by lightning
Frightened by thunder
Covered with mud
Hungry for fire
Searching, hungry for swords
Coming distinct and alive

Telepictures stream the glottis
Telepictures stream the eye
Like pictorial lymph
The body fluids alive and sentient
It shutter opens
And from her neck
And from a pink and gold umbilicus
Hangs a morbid child
About fourteen years old
Flash on the operant
Examine the face
Her mange
The mange and the wounds are as shewstones
You may scry and find secrets in the swarming wounds.

Her bruises
Her filth
The diamonds in her teeth
How she glistens beneath the filth
How she gleams and smiles forth putrefaction
The buzzing of insects
The sprouting of fruit
Watch the spirits of dissolution stream from her skins
The skin puckers
Below the circus people clap with delight.

And from the blister
Pops a seed
A root seed
A ramble seed
A song seed
An ample seed
The eye flares and fades
The eye closes.

It's a white room now
It's a white bed
And so deliciously quiet
The background chirm of radiation
Brushes my ears.
Buzzing, humming to myself
I dream the cells opening
I feel the sentience of the strands within
I begin to sense distinct chromonata
Projecting their axis toward the bejeweled helix of one of the strands
When suddenly a tiny stampede comes
From behind my shoulder to distract me
It lives brothers!
It lives sisters!
The back guys have me throttled from the nape
Thrusting me forward
And I keep blanking!
Like Marie Falconetti
Like Helen Keller
Like sometimes whitening
Like sometimes lightening
Recession into a black pinpoint of Planck's length
Because I sit on this white bed surrounded by white
Surrounded by quiet
It is so very quiet
So deliciously
I can hear the silty stir of background radiation
Brush the ear
Brush the hair on the head
Like sexual wind
I can hear the traders swapping trinkets
To be entertained by my brain
And then through the side window
(The window is closed)
I become aware of the window
Only when it shatters, splinters
Breaking everywhere
Bits flying into my skin
And this large, flapping, meaty bat-like gargoyle comes and lands
Startled and panicked on my white bed!
And it is so wild with panic and blood!
And now I'm covered with it
And so thoroughly freaked that I lunge for it
And I am vibrating

What threads?
What lives in the micromovements of my hands?
Can I hear it?

The forces of dissolution still alive within my skins,
The gene swarm was radiant there
But the guards will not permit it.

The shutter opens it's an eye
The procession of industry comes
The procession of machinery comes
With its drums
In their changing forms
But if the moving dog
Across the tundra
Is a very long thing
And a different creature entirely
Than a standing-still dog
This procession of industrial machinery
Is a long thing at first gross with bulk metals and enormous in size
Successively becoming smaller at the tail
These gross extensions of the nervous system clanking heavy
Off the skins of the populace
Shrinking in size till ephemera
Disappear down our throats and behind our eyes
Into our ancestral cells
To extend our bodies without burdens!
To grow us wings and distant sensing!
To free us from bodily harm!

The shutter opens
All inanimate things are striving for sentience here
One day all inanimate things will be alive!
Today drifting snow ghosts cross the highways
Specters of sand brushing and scratching to be born
Human hands kindly help the densest stuff like metals
To the earth's surface
To exploit thoroughly
To stress and refine
To ceaselessly combine and recombine
Metals come to life this way
As servants
As conductors of light and intelligence
The giant machines grow small
The exploitation of all matter
Once hyper-extended
Now the interference violating the substructures of all things
Machines become smaller, and more refined
In order to know,
To quicken these things
To bring them to life.

Arsenic, iron, mercury, copper
Cubanite, enargite, wolfsbergite
Pyro-metallurgical drying
Hydro-metallurgical wetting
Electro-metallurgical shocking
The smelting, the dry extraction
Calcinating to eliminate impurities
The roasted ore smelted to a mixture of sulfides
The impure copper slags off the iron
As blue-metal, pimple metal, or fine, white metal.

How the technicians
Metallurgists and smiths
Lose their moorings
Lose contact
Lose reciprocity
With the things born from their hands.
Spiritual technicians
Their hands
Lose contact
Their innards
Lose contact
With the heavens
Born from the fluid of their making.

Exploitation of all substance.
Single operations spanning great distances
Oceans and mountains
And piercing the thinnest heterotic string
Interference becomes more and more stressful,
More and more fine,
At gigahertz, at nanahertz, Planck's length and the Curie Point.
Exploitation of matter maximized
And miniaturized
Machines grown gross
Till exhaustion
The pressure on the people
By a tyrannical overlord
Stressful
The gracious forest turns her face away as she is
Scarred to vindicate the scarmaker

The exhaustion of culture
The exhaustion of children
The exhaustion of we who live, work and die in deadly boxes
The shaming of the evolutionary flowers
The shaming of the antennaed ones who see what no one else has seen
The exhaustion of air and water
The exhaustion of nourishment
Exhaustion of bodies of sea-faring and air-borne creatures.

And too many centuries of talk on oppression, repression,
Suppression, depression
And too little talk on the sensation of press
The smell of it
The feel of it
The sound of it
The stings of command
The onset of press
The illusion, delusion of being pressed
And the way out from under
The foxholes, burrows and egress from press.

Withdraw
The attention must withdraw from the nerve endings
Withdraw
The attention will become exquisitely small
The liberation of each
Deep within
Into the skin
Wounds cut and exposed, cut and exposed recessively
Into places infinitely small
As the atoms have called,
Now the songs from the cells
Where the gene swarm is radiant
The ancestral language is alive
And unlikely strands dance and commingle
Making the forms of yet unknown souls.
The roots of pathologies, malformations are there
And springing into fantastic creatures.

Tabernacle of ten curtains
Layers of tissue
Tanned ram and goat skins
A grating, network of bronze
Veiled courtyard of fine-twined linen
Veils upon veils
Consistency folds and unfolds
Wound doorways into the tanned ramskins
The endless tiers
The morphology of pain
On the electromagnetic spectrum
The shapes of opening
The shapes of the wounds
The sacrifice of ease
Into disease
Wound doorways
God says, I am here (powerful, invisible)
Thereby dematerializing you
God says, I am here
Thereby vanquishing you
Vanishing you
Opening your skins
Like wound doorways.

Through the chattering teeth
In the bloodying of the psychic nostrils
It comes by smell
We can smell it this time
The presence of Mercurius, the master
Proud hermaphrodite
Full-breasted man with the gait of a woman
Nobly-cocked woman with the voice of a man
Lightning creator of the Alchemical Circus
The afterbirth of our replacements
Mercurius is the quicksilver motility of speciation
Who rides cloaked as bio-signals on the spirals of DNA
He sings and spins with the ancestors of all creatures
And I am so stunned by Its presence I'm unable to move
Of course I'm thoroughly recognized
And feel the silvering everywhere.

So terrified I stutter like a Sunday school child
"I like the Tower of Babel best!"
"I like how it rises sand-colored against the cobalt blue sky!"
I like to watch the monotheist Cyclopes
Desperately swarm the tower
Looking in one direction only
And below the people scream in a thousand glorious tongues
For the others to come down!
And there's a pause…

And suddenly
The He-She who has coupled with me from the day I was born
Throws Its head back and laughs uproariously, his head filling the sky
And then
With a spangle of shyness
Mercurius
Turns from male to female and from female to male

Then Mercurius is busy, silvering behind the formless mass
The chaotic substance
Be it thick and slippery,
Be it thin and dry,
Be it shallow and pale,
Be it fat and buzzing,
Be it tender to the touch,
Rough to the touch,
He-she's silvering up behind the formless
Those silvery, speciating lights from behind the eyes,
The mass configuring.

(And this one is drying.  And that one is drowning in the rain.
And this one is angry, churning, thickening its skins.  That one was eaten
by a wolf, which is burning.  The freezing, the smelting, the dry
extractions.)

And the growth of the longest teeth
On the devouring animal
The shaping of the muscle
On the one who would constrict and strangle
The growing of weapons from the body of bones
And the extension of bat's ears
Into the realms of sonar
The thickening of the foveae
In the Kingfisher's eye
This one knows the night!
And that one sees what no one else can see!

Proud Hermaphrodite
Proud mover of mass into form
Proud glistening seed and transformer of seed
Proud physician
Proud virus
Who calls the freaks "marvels" and all malformations?
Who exclaims, "All pathologies are mine!"?
Who penetrates?
Who travels to the roots
Holding the malformed in his arms?
Tap-examining the bodies.
Sensing with filaments and cirri
The wound in the making
Sonic affliction
Doorways of affliction
The radius, amplitude and frequency
The color of shock
The sentient code
The messenger of the wound
The message of the messenger

Amidst the fire folk
The aerodynamic bodies
Genetic combinauts
Horse girls, hawk boys, hexagon women
The Sineater
And Eelgirl
Commingling
Creating new electromagnetic combinations
Of conscience and magic
An ancestor recognizes you and calls out your name
She opens her coat's lining to show you hung treasures
And deep within you see histories of changes
Individuals who have brought you here
She says you may have whatever she's got
The freakish velocity of Great Uncle Filipov
Grandmother Helene's uncanny vision
Sedonia, her sister's perfect selflessness
The primary raptor's talon of capture.

Then ancestral woman you've forgotten
She knows you better
She calls to you again with an offer
You absently ask her the price of the talons
She responds with a price
"The reverie that flippers on your periphery!"
Now she's got you.
"The sinkholes of nostalgia that sucker you silly!"
You laugh.
"Your voracious morbidity."
"Your voracious morbidity."

You pause to cast your eyes on the whirligig, the centrifuge where you now
live, to find all inanimate things helped to sentience there.  Bodily fluids
are living beings, exiting, entering, and trading secrets.  Open wounds good
as shewstones.  Debris and decay humming with revealed pleasure.  Because
sensing is active transfiguring, substance changing.  The act of seeing
changing the substance of the seer.  The act of smelling changing the
smeller.  The act of hearing changes the substance of the listener.  The
properties of life reveal themselves, speaking from the serum and the pink
cell lines kindling likeness in once-motionless things.