Skronk Tectonics

Plactivist—a disembodied word. Decontextualized. One word in bas-relief, that I heard her say, in a slurry of words not directed at me.

Plactivist—decoupled and set adrift from its word cloud. It blazed like a meteorite across the my cerebral cortex and burned up somewhere in my temporal lobe.

Plactivist—I pictured a curved sickle scaler. A shadow with giant scalers for hands floating at my dim peripheries. Only the glint of the oversized probes resolved at the edges of sight.

My head in a vise as “Ode to Joy” — Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 in D minor (opus something or other) the fourth movement (you know)—blared. The chorale full-throated. Exultant.

(And in a split screen I saw myself and Alex, the Droog—all “vised-up” too, his eyes splayed open by pincers and locked—hey, wait how did I end up in a Kubrick film? No. No matter.)

Jump cut: The plactivist filled my line of vision. Surely, a shadow, most opaque—a maw of darkness behind … is that a head mirror? What serious doctor wears a head mirror?

No. This was a plactivist. It wore a plague mask filled with cardamom, cinnamon, and durian fruit, which slid about the beak-end of the mask in counterpoint to the faraway calls to: Bring out your dead. Bring out your dead.

The plactivist scaled the depth of its shadow center—darkening, deepening, its own anti-matter. It’s own anti-being—black ice incarnate.

How does one weigh one’s soul? How does one quantify one’s shadow—or the intentions of our shadows as they try to flee the pin of our feet?

And then the space lightened. Not limbo—not a clockwork—or an inner circle of hell.

I heard her say plactivist — as in “play and activist, dummy!” But no solace settled, by now my soul was in need of repair.

Then I spied my soul—occupied—as it throttled its own shadow.

“Just in case God isn’t dead, our astronauts carry sidearms.”

— Ben Lerner / Angle of Yaw