Poison Planet

Poison Planet

No Future/No Past

Dear Matthew, Matthew my darling, Matthew as you bend your head down to sweep with your fingers long and delicate the ground in front of your boot, Matthew the pickpocket, Matthew erupting with heavy ropes of black intent from the shadows surrounding your heart, Matthew as you rest with your elbow a delicate point on your throne, my love resting at the bottom of this grave of you, my love lost to the secrets of your heart and the whispers which hold you hostage there, my love constricting you like the talons of a great bird, Matthew who has eviscerated me and filled me with strange insects made of jewels and the peppered spices of noxious and toxic weeds, Matthew of the stiffest hair, dried to a blue dark enough to blush against the night, hapless Matthew, shivering in the cold, shirtless Matthew, anger evident on every inch of your skin, which is my skin, Matthew, sweet contagion and infection, Dear Matthew,

There are rabbits in the underbrush, and snakes by the river.  There are a million arteries through which blood might flow.  There are a million places at least you might bury yourself in the ground of this earth.  I came here to tell you that you're right.  There is no one else, and we're alone.  Dig deeper, and den the ground, and make room, and sleep.

Matty

In wreaths around an originating stalk, the ivy spirals, the clusters of leaves dark and matte in the blue light. Flat and wide, it's crowded by other glossy plant life, blackish in the night. The sound of the river is just a breath louder than the wind through the jungle.  It's a blue night on the moon, the stars tinting the ground violet and chartreuse.  

When I'm close to you, my cells come alive with the nearness of something familiar and not at once; the twitch and sting of a known trespasser.  Here we fly low over the gravel outside the jungles, over sediment hills formed when this place was an ocean and collected chips of rock like arrowheads, falling like sheets of paper through the deep places.  Here we roll like otters onto our backs while we fly, as safe as the last children of a genocidal prophecy come true.  When my name is Miriam, yours is Lazarus.  

Bachelorette

Our kind never die.  We enjoy fallow seasons and times of strife when symbiosis is lost.  Infections begin, flourish, and fall back again when another property is introduced.  The blooms from the ivy that is released from the space squeezing my heart is rife with pollen, which erupt into the air microscopically to be inhaled into the lungs of those who are breathing nearby.  Bacteria dance like glitter in the air, resting in the soft tissues just inside your nose.  I roll onto my side, sleeping late in my bed, dusted with the silt of your dead skin and your broken hairs and eyelashes and fingernails.  I feel your infections growing inside me, like branches reaching for sky.  

People want us to die, of course, but.

Marina

It's because we're singing songs they don't know, and can't even hear.  

Trains of your flora uncurl, strange and dark, to touch mine, when we're in separate rooms.  They knot together, tangle, thicken into something sturdy and immovable, a trunk fashioned from the spiral of my hesitance and your hate, my fear and your ardor, my arrogance and your heartbreak.  

It's because they feel it, reaching out to them, and they want to cut it off when it comes near.  

To a human, it's a constrictor's grip, tightening around them a reality not their own, a feeling of being devoured or poisoned.  I could have as easily been the villain as I've always said you were.  Just ask Adam.

We sing together a song that wends through the dark air and along the footpaths that have been worn into the banks of the river.

Vessel

The cities are buried beneath the ground, where the roots of the plants reach down and cross the vast chasm to the other side.  The one I've seen in you is built with gears massive enough to ignore their slow revolutions.  The ghost flowers creep down into the dark, nestling among the airless and lightless fungi, gumming smaller workings with soil and slime.  The point is nothing is sacred.  This is what my voice sounds like there.

Medusa

I am an addictive chemical genetically similar to morphine.  I spread by way of a reddish flower with a black center, the root structure of which connects to form a single organism.  Adam inhales deeply before injecting this chemical into his veins, and I feel with him the sweep of adrenaline rushing through him like a clean and expectant broom.  Then he presses the plunger and feels the sharp green release flood him.

Where we come from, this would be the equivalent of having beautiful eyes, and I do.  

You are a chemical genetically similar to heartbreak, both soft and romantic and hard and cutting as glass shattering on the asphalt.  When I feel like my heart is breaking is when I'm seeing something beautiful.  Sometimes I feel you when I am alone and have forgotten my name, only to remember it again.  When I am certain nothing is too late.  You have beautiful eyes.

Raphael

We learn to live with the people addicted most to us like humans do.  We try to love them back like humans do.  But the rules are wrong, and the parameters different.  There is less exchange, less infection, less devouring, or... maybe more of it.  I can't tell.  I just know there is a threat of everything fragile breaking beneath the weight of the sunlight of this world.  

I wonder if you'll know what I mean, and be able to tell me.  We might always be seen as something exotic and intoxicating.  Until we turn to poison, because we've reached too far or gone too deep.

Warrior Lord

My emotions are active, and have muscle.  I extend them both gently and viciously.  They extend like many hands, each attached to different arms.  When you came home, I felt you through 2 floors, the dark and brittle fabric of the emotions you were sending up through the cement and tile, looking for someone to notice, to trip, to fight you.  Anything, maybe.  

I descended to the basement, to look at the thick branches like columns in the room, and I began to run my fingers along each spine, testing for your shiver.  You responded with small flowers, star-shaped, deep green, and I sucked each one gently and left their petals wet from my saliva.  

There's an emotional warfare implied in all we do, but it might not be warfare at all, but a struggle for an equal environment.  One in which all things might live.  Back down to you I sent my letters, like a rainfall of dry leaves, or a canopy of all my blunt awareness.

Sleeping With Ghosts

The shadows of what are the same between us have haunted me while we make love since we started to say them out loud to one another.  Your eyes sometimes a fox green, your head sometimes heavy with your crown, and your wreath of vines behind you in the darkness.  

I might not have understood... something about myself without that.  

By Some Miracle

Our world ending, you built a spaceship beneath the ground, and we flew together to the other side of the galaxy where we came to rest by a tiny blue planet whose oceans we liked the color of.  I made up long stories about the world below us, and eventually we fell like angels to it's surface.  We're the only survivors, and that's because of you.

The oceans of the moon long ago dried up, the wind long ago something high and keening, the plants long ago calloused to thick leaves prepared to withstand the vacuum of nothingness.  The gears inside you grind in places, and whirl smooth in others.  You wrapped who you are around it's surface, overtook it, strangled it with all you knew, to remember, or maybe to forget.

I think you kept such a great machine alive, and filled it with yes, as you said, ghosts, and memories.  It was always alive, as a part of where we came from.  But now, it's a part of you, lashed to you with the wide stalks of your hopes, and your dreams, and twined among them are all the wishes of men, given to the man in the moon.

Fast As You Can

If we had any sense...

Animal Impulses

I've never been able to...

You taught me to...

In the last few days, I've begun to understand... something... visual about everything I am and do which I didn't before.  The gnarled tree of my dark heart, and the gently waving tree of my lightened one...

I guess I'd never considered that I made the river, such as it is, and it was always made of me.  Maybe that's ridiculous, but it felt more that I was a vessel into which a place had been stuffed, like... the way one is pregnant.  I'd never considered that I might've spilled it's undergrowth from my fingernails, or that every body I'd buried there feathered grass out into the barren riverbanks.  That the dust in the air was made of the broken shafts of my hair.  I never considered something so... indecent.  And perverse.

I couldn't say, and wouldn't know how to say, something you told me so plainly the other day I almost fainted with surprise.  How we touch, where it isn't seen.  How I've tried to touch anyone, where it isn't seen, with things that... burst from a cold place in my chest and creep through the house like ivy.  Looking for a surface onto which I could paint my touch.

I'm reaching... in this moment, I am reaching for you.  The branches are soft and pale green, and there are many forming a spiderweb as it approaches you.  It flowers small and white, and they have no scent.  Where it's close to me is a carpet of silver velvet, and it looks thick and dense and impossible to escape, but they're young.  Young and low to the ground and easy to trample, or cut back, or incinerate.

Avalanche

Renewal is what makes it so you are always a virgin, your own season of spring.  Renewal, and the touching of that which you maybe never considered could be touched.  It was this that led me to tell you, weeks ago, that it wasn't a far walk from who I am to who you are.  That I know how many you've brushed idly, walking by, surrounded by something like a halo.

Pepper-Tree

With any luck, you know everything I'm saying is true because you've begun to relate this to every sexual encounter you've ever had.  It was hard for me to feel... touched.  But I could tell I was touching other people.  When

When I came home, it was to Adam, and he as the earth had some sense of how to create a surface onto which I might be able to grow.  Sex with him began to feel lazy... teasing... torturous for him.

When you came home, I felt things I didn't know how to explain, but I can try now.

Somehow, it is tangled between us where we have roots first.  We're connected there, and it was from there that you rose up, dirty and shaking loose the ground, to examine my hands.

Hands which you found to be... lax in sleep and waiting for your touch.  In that, I could feel small ferns of lost hope frozen by a cold snap, thawing rapidly and releasing toxins of regret into the air.  Your panic was a reddish thorn bush, dense but supple enough in it's newness to reach through it and find the flat surface of your torso.  I breathed in your resolve and your certainty, and I begged you not to stop, so you could perhaps feel mine.

Release My Heart

The obvious drawback of all this is that I can feel... perhaps your regret for ever touching me sometimes, or a fear that now we are linked forever, just like...

A surrender of your autonomy, or a resignation that it would be painful or deadly to be so.  I can see from here the spikes of warning, as easily as the fronds of invitation.  If it feels sometimes like I'm invading a place I don't belong, I'm suggesting it might be inherent in our natures to do so.  But then, you've been doing it to me since you got here, in showing me the mirrors and illusions in Hell, in stranding me inside you, where it's my nature to question all the reality I'm faced with, and leaving me there.

I only want to show you that I'm not afraid of that enough to ever let it end, and I want to affect you someday the way you've affected me.

Ian 59

Ian,

In slightest trespass, I fold my knuckle of my index finger over the mezzanine of your wrist, sitting idle by the record player sick with ivy.  I want to whisper to you that it will never play, not again, after this song.  Whatever magic it would take to break this record player, and wear it's needle to a nub, I feel I can possess in a little ball, and force it down your throat, heavy and burning with a cool light.  

If you place the stylus... 

Adam's voice is a whimper, coming through eons of static.  We all turn to look at the sound, like chimpanzees distracted.  He's telling us how to make a record, and how to cut sound into the flesh of the world, and we must've decided to do it, for him.  

To make a record.  To carve symbols to always remember into the stone rolls of cuneiform which revealed to us our own histories, Adam must've offered his flesh and bone - the rocks of the earth - to be our tablets.  

But with what instrument would he be carved?

Hammers, and chisels, and knives, and the fine-tipped stylus.  It's a wonder it was Nick with a head for pain, and not Adam.  Nick, who likes to be tickled.  Nick, who wants to be scarred.

"Never?" you ask me, and your voice sounds as if you might be sad.  What would you pick, for this player's swan song?  It would surely warble, and diminish into a fractured silence.  

"Never," I agree, and we look the long way down at the ground beneath us, and how everyone looks so small.  

The intermediaries of this world and the next,

Adam explains his magic, and we all go about our business, the show over, the rapture passed, the cool thing now commonplace.  Just Adam, found a way to tell us about the beginning of the world again.  Wait until the movie comes out.

Of all the tools I've seen on earth, I like the lathe the best.  The piece of wood is fastened to a spinning wheel, that rotates fast enough to bore into the wood with stylus, and with knife, and with chisel, to fashion something round.  Like a potter's wheel, for table legs.  I press into the block with the stylus, and I ask you to speak.  

Someday, your voice will distract us all, warbling inconstant from the wax record produced in this moment when I'm lightly brushing the wood with the changes in pressure caused by your voice.

"Once upon a time, in a faraway land," you begin, and Adam is carved into something which houses this fable, and I am the needle which repeats it.

Love,

Annik