Night Sky Electric

I hear the prattle of death’s rattle as it searches for its corpse. It does not come for me tonight, but its search is in earnest. I can hear the effort in its breath and the lead its step. I’d like to address it, correct its step, elude its attention. Were there enough people in the tower you ask. I don’t know — were there?

I’d ask you to ask, but I know you’re reluctant to engage death directly. There are fifty-five mothers in there, where are they hiding death? Do they all nurse it? Who has the temerity to burp it? Thunder in the anteroom, ice in the basement, yet the casements melt and I feel rather provincial and spun into a dense web of misplaced filial piety. I voted in an elusive election and was awarded electrocution instead.

 Proper elocution was de rigueur — Derrida was stuck in your escutcheon, and you forgot the  keys to the crypt.

So I’ll elide my vowels for the rest of my days. My days full of short scrums and long pitches. I’d like to spend my remaining middays ordering my consonants into flotation devices — my vices tend to sink like the Kursk or the Graf Spee. I still wish to live in a bathysphere, for I have an abundance of sins at the pawn shop and you’ve got a pocket thick with cash. And here is where you proclaim your hazy thesis riddled with jocular contradictions: spatially condensed sins are best macerated in your urine specimen effusive and elusive. Thunder only happens when you’re draining and evil presses down upon us all.

Upon us all.

Now we track, and contract, the constellations — knocked out of their obstinate orbits: Look, the night sky appears to be scratching its skin off!

What I’m Reading:

Well, we’re barely a nation at all anymore, but I’m glad we’re still in space. We have to be going some place other than down the toilet.

— Octavia Butler / Parable of the Sower