BY PETER MILNE GREINER
Tristan Da Couch
I went to the deserted city
I was somewhere weird
You were there but you were you
I was a fainter and you were a fainter
Up we wake and fail to see the present Little
Picture that remains as remnants do: as conciliation and consumption,
analysis like a little empty street emptying into others
Familiar seasons while they still are: I enjoy them
I hear you say because I’m conscious ish
While I was out and you were out
there was a dream and in the dream there was a phone
It said on Wednesday it would be a hundred and twenty
degrees and I said well there I go again
accepting every prediction
I mine human doing for all its garish hyperobjects
and here they all are—all of them, so that takes care of that
Fata morgana of the Hot Earth, show me a beautiful container ship
Show me Area 51 over Rockaway Beach
Now I’m a figure and its surroundings which includes you
I wonder where my essay words went when
the air is not thinner by much at the top of Ayers Rock
and my thinkpiece for The Guardian about the South China Sea does not surge
through me like a season in Hell
Specific place, specific city, I say to the orange dust and the orange star
and to the medium orange monkey and the vines on everything
You have no other person now, no other verifiable populating agent
Godrays, I say, do your specific thing over the savannahs
Unending theta wave that can be reduced to hunger, feed me
after REM but before Sleep some bands who’ll get better
Some who’ll get worse
And some who’ll drive my tour hearse
Mysticism coterminous with a sense of fairness if not modern science, I say
The nature of hallucination has changed
Everything has changed
In the Uncanny Valley the last dinosaurs look at me and I see their giant primitive nausea
Someday I will go I mutter still
not fully up on a great journey and be tormented by change
To the barely charted and the overcharted
All the cold equators
The Olympus Monses
The Dead Horse Bays
The tidbits of vision will build up gestaltlessly but whatever
Swamp gas will play its same old trick
Everyone will fall for it because everyone will want to
Cross I will the Giant’s (sunken) Causeway to the Isle of Something
There I will be wayward once or I will be wayward when this happens again
when I was or will be part part-machine, part part-flesh
when I’m deliverer, deliveree, deleter, deletee
When I’m all that is primordial
God of werewolves, god of bigfeet, god of sharknados
I wanted to be a civilization you reply
I wanted to be passive
I wanted to meet George Jetson
My life’s crop of pacifying, withheld facts are
everything everyone takes with them to, if they’re lucky, the grave
God of tardigrades, I turn over a non-leaf and lift
the spacerock from the heart’s brittle peninsulas and I appease you
I unlay the waste
I uncurve the sun
I set aside for a moment the order of all things
I open the cenotes and close the naked singularities
I swim into every abyss willingly
I close my eyes gently and, living entirely in the present, reflect timelessly on whatevs
God of albedo, of the reflectivity of bodies, protect the intentions
I set this Leap Day, protect my epic hamartia from being buried in everyone’s feed
Plead, plead, retry, retry
Yottobyte of bullshit that has passed through my head, cancel
Color image of Phobos I want to be the population pulse of Hawai’I halted
Color image of Deimos I want to be a brief window of perfect conditions
What takes place here on this remote and exotic couch
stays on this couch, on this glitchless Real
I make couchfall if the weather’s fair
This is the world’s remotest inhabited couch
Tristan da Couch
This is where I detonate my secret feelings
The impact cradle of your theory of conspiracy
Ice, ice, mesa, cushion
The only square feet I have left
is The One Bedroom Alcove
The Mid-Atlantic Ridge
The Orion-Cygnus Arm
The old road to the Magellanic Cloud
I went to the deserted city detector and the readings were strange and everywhere
and right on top of us
I look into its Magic Eye half-asleep and I see present laughter pressed
against your dying wish like a microphone
I press record
Yes Old Flame comes voice
The properties of voice
You’re a genie, you’re Victor Frankenstein
So make me a polymath
Aulacogen
Quote unquote meanwhile there too was the whole
world with which I wasn’t super involved
It was ending
It mattered to me
A lifetime of non sequiturs returns to my throat
That’s what I tell myself when you come,
ahem, arrive in my mouth literally on a litter
Your gaze like steady impersonal drone footage
writes a San Andreas Fault through my center
of gravity and it’s like you’re my dad and I’m your mom
Isn’t life a little petty, I remarked
Maybe life is just me, I remarked
Maybe I have a parabola of crust like the Earth and deep
within it the neutrino detector is a dreamcatcher
Caught in the taut sinew and trickling down through the feathers
maybe this random mutation that makes me sensitive
to the direction of magnetic poles is what Deleuze calls an encounter
and I call my Rites of Ingress and Dissolution
Wait what on Saturday I ran John Zorn’s credit card, looked up
the word fidelity on my phone, and thought about why
civilization doesn’t work, why it doesn’t come naturally
It’s like a long, bad braid, I told Robin in my sage’s murmur
I thought of more primitive forms of life, I wondered what lemma
led to this place of sacred jeopardies
Full disclosure the giant viruses live forever in the Fountains of Youth
I discover in actually most things
Is it scientifically liquid, this stuff, this icky ichor
It runs through the Fountain like a one sentence synopsis of eternity
The giant viruses balance equation-like on the edge of zen
Research: I listen to their ambient, experimental reasons for being
and they check out against my (working) theory of everything
except you
I trample their uncanny nests and Jenga-quake their loft of cards
and that, ladies and germs, is called good old Holocene intervention
Research: I swam amongst all the orbs and all the firmaments
first and first I lost my footing, then my tilt, my axis
I lost my inclination
And just so you know I lost it completely, my location,
though it’s still there always in the corner of my eye like Big Foot
in the elegiac nature doc in which I am disambiguated as
a type of were-energy, a fable by Hans Christian Anderson,
and a former mayor of Pitcairn or Tristan da Cunha
Abstract: the stomach and spine are quasi-mind says the internet,
the brain’s backwater
Someone or something please rise from it like a coelacanth
and warn me again about how much time there has been
Someone or something please prevent me from digging this pool
because it would be my luck that beneath me at this moment is Troy
I can’t find it, not again
Research: I assemble a wide range of pasts asymmetrically
on the operating table
It stands to reason there is no Adonis past here, only candidate holotype pasts
Hymn: What is now Wyoming
Experiment: What is now Norway
Pinnacle: What is now situated where
What legacy I wonder but my legacy of dissipation
could I possibly leave behind since four Galilean moons
is already taken and so is carbon dating
Since I can’t do the math because I can’t do math
I guess I’ll sort of wait, inevitably, for the inevitable
And since it’s you it’s sort of auto-whatever
And since it’s you I’m buried alive under the creepy geoglyph
Since it’s you I’m stuck here in this sub-amazing Fertile
Crescent of dark matter
and as luck would have it I’m balls deep in this dude’s diary
and inside his great circle of logic there are four gates
and eight months and after them I’m going to
chop this myrrh tree down and build my stump to sit on
and thus burnt out on being centered
I will minimize my mouth and disinhibit the vistas,
reach nirvana casually but only for a second, then actual
millennia will transpire, each one beginning with the same abstract
So Unconclusion 1: Searching for every single one of my cells
I keep finding all of them right here
at the exact moment I break the light barrier
with my body and return to you in the only way
I can that absence of me you’ve trained
so hard to imagine is impossible
Please try to be patient I’m rewriting
the book on remote because
everyone knows what it is except me by the way
Unconclusion 2: Cell membrane, cell wall, cell last bastion
of hope against evil
I hold the tattered flag of Unified Earth
against my heaving breast then
course collision, speed ramming,
impact brace, love
freedom
people you
Peter Milne Greiner is the author of the chapbook Executive Producer Chris Carter (The Operating System 2014). His poems, science fiction, and other writings have appeared in Fence, Omni Reboot, H_NGM_N, Diner Journal, InDigest, Coldfront, and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn.