Poetry Annual · Fall 2003
Tiempo Espiral
Geoff Manaugh
Typing to you aus Deutschland, where the solstice approaches
on a fiery chariot, heaving the sun
higher and higher for
longer everyday, night lasting only four hours now,
where a solar storm last Thursday sent
rolling coronas of charged particles breathing
like dragons toward the earth,
and they stayed in the sky, hovering, the
northern lights at noon—
and so here I hurl this thought-broadcast,
Free Radio on ultra-FM,
frequent sequences of
sequential high-frequencies, all of it for everyone:
alive now in Berlin, with Shieva, both
maniacs, awake in the storm together,
drinking Milchkaffee beneath 10 billion tons of
electrified solar gas burning through the sky in loops,
constellational energy older than Jerusalem
showers our faces, fusing with
undiscovered internets of nerve, eye, hand,
heart: we synthesize new proteins,
sweating constant streams of narcotics
onto the surface of a hollow earth—
Dancing, almost every night in a
strobelit tour of the engine room of Paradise,
where everything turns red, the walls red, everyone's skin
red, my brain red, the music red, red,
red as the clay of the early earth when
every monstrosity was still possible,
tectonics of organized noise
slamming off the floor, ceiling, self-interacting echoes off
eardrums, two hundred crazed angels
dancing in a basement together, stars curving in
slow gravitational arcs above us, and then, and then—
two days later walking solo down sun-scorched streets of northern Berlin
with U-Bahns above you, soaring out of tunnels in the ground on
mechanized skeletons of future world serpents, weaving snakelike in
velocity-knots around the perimeter of the city, their rattling
tooth-chatter, their gear-meshed rumble,
soundtracking every thought process
within five miles,
when suddenly you notice you are seven feet taller than everyone around you,
your molecules stretched into organs, every pore a lung,
breathing in pollution and
breathing out perfume—
you walk past newspaper kiosks and some part of you without a name
instantaneously translates every headline into a
beehive of other languages, intersections of syntax,
where grammars collide:
looking at a German-English dictionary
all you can think is where traintracks combine, vast
switching yards outside Berlin's main station:
Paris, Prague, Rome; Russian, Spanish,
Arabic; language like
smooth tracks, carrying us
over the world with winged engines,
and you hop a curb, and you smile, and you catch a glimpse of a
cathedral steeple over the top of a nearby department store—
you have amazing dreams every night, of conspiracies and
apartments, mansions on the Caribbean seaside,
vast cameras assembled from dinosaur skeletons in the desert,
a kiss, a locked room,
that your car was stolen and then returned two days later
washed and cleaned—
there are comets in the sky that no one can see—
you have no idea what anything means anymore—
you know exactly what everything means now—
the world an integrated circuit, every inch
fractal with depths no time could encompass—
time, as always, a spiral—
space, a message we must travel—
out of center with myself in this
cafe perched on the edge of the universe,
writing a message from my solar system to yours—
watch the horizon:
the glow in the mornings is not the sun but me,
transforming sulfur into phosphorous, helium to love—
the rumble you hear, my dancing,
heart pulsing slow-motion breakbeats breaking down
continental faultlines, my body
making love to the earth,
unlocked from its hinges,
turning in space—
Berlin, 2000