How the Cigarette Burns

It was two widths of a lamb’s shank that separated us, clandestine, but surmised, between membranous sheets of silicon. At this moment, I can see her eyes, perpendicular to mine, forming a kaleidoscopic centrifuge of human mirage. From this angle, I cannot look into her eyes, I can focus but on one. Yet that one is delicious, succulent. Bloated with saline solution that shimmers as she shudders, spilling out into the lake of her stone iris, fractally chipped with stammering jade that thins as it seeps its color into its imminent pupil black hole, that rack-tortured frozen moment at the event horizon’s edge, curling to its abyssal infinity.

The pupils absorb all of the radiating information that encounters them. The pupil does not seek out knowledge, the are commanded to absorb by the density of their adult potentiality. And by the knowledge itself. The coaxing corpus of ever-out-bulging information, to teach the pupils all about the world the pupil will never encounter. To spell out the words of the living universe that can only be dropped into this pit of selfishness. Now,

Sit still! Or it gets the knuckles again! Pay attention, you little gnat.

The gnat’s feathered antennae flip and twist, sensing the air pressure changes, that, surprisingly, sounds a lot like hearing. But without the fidelity to render words from the mynx-deft Introductrix. Let it rub its greedy mandibles together. There’s something in the Eyre that keeps dreaming us into place. Here in this padded cell with but one window. As if the only way to die was to bludgeon one’s skull against cement. No, Horatio, let me count you the ways. Listen to my dreaming, Avogadro. You will hear it on channel broadband, so long as you stick a cable up your ass. Hear, hear, here, let me help you.

And her eyes are not yet unawake. I could still stare into them, but I would not then be able to view the reflected statuesque monument of me. I would sooner expire your breathing than be denied this endlessly fire-watching glory. If one man died for another man’s sainthooded salvation, would Kamm-Kamm still baste her chickens with Caspian limes? That’s an unfair postulation!, cried the tiny violinist stroking his beard and preparing for an oratorio moment from his sneaker’s coroner. But with a pimch, I dispatch him like a flea. Do not fall asleep, my dear.

Whether my verse should lull the sense of sensing and common fencing a bridge between two worlds as impermeable as a sheet of silicon. In other words, there are ways through this.

But what can I learn of myself by letting myself drown in her eyes? Forever lost to me is the image of me, only this pseudo-remembrance of what I had seen there.

And what did you see, Joshua?

Hands go clammy and a tongue puckers. A racing strip of ideas suddenly screech to a halt, baited by the fearsome acknowledgment of his name. When you are young, your musings are fantastical, because, let’s be honest here, you really don’t know how everything exactly fits together. There is great room for magic, or at least fabulous speculation that might just have the possibility of being true. Can an elephant really ride a tiny unicycle along a thick sailors rope tied about thirteen hundred feed up between two iconic skyscrapers? Maybe? Sure, why not? Who really, I mean in the end, who really gives a shit. Why shouldn’t it be possible? What god-forsaken shit-pile do we live in, if this, this simple little request were impossible?

I shudder to think, her eyes say, speaking from the heart of their blackness, a signal! A signal escapes! Earth1 to Earth2—can you hear me?

What a simple concept, that this billiard of our terrestrial home, be the site of nearly all our fantasy, as if the process of engineering entirely new climates, biomes and histories were too difficult for the skull chum that never slips a moment’s beat. One, two, check.

Check one, two. Rutabaga, artichoke, pumpkin pie.