Einstein Starfish Waltz

Einstein Starfish Waltz

The night is filled with barnacles and phosphorescent jellies that dream ghost-dreams
Adrift in the amber filled wonderland
We sink and sink
Beneath waves of forgetting
Forgetting forgetting,
Reach for the starfish
Starfish inverted-bellies digest on the outside,
Cheap suit, glass-cutter jaws
Swimming,
We are swimming uncertain;
Chumming, humming, thrumming
Fingers over life-lines
And love-lines,
The palm reader is deep in the fluorescent light of the midway
A drunken step from the deep blue sea,
A shuffle step from eternity.

The mighty have fallen,
Lumberjack swings, axe-split,
Lickety split,
Into the soft embrace of the tender arms of yesterday.
Because you are not there,
I cannot hear me fall,
Because you are not there,
I fall and I hear you are not there.
The forest makes no noise,
Because its shrill laughter has made you deaf.
Fucker.

The sky is a compost.
The dust of the Big Bang is rotten.
What did you expect? Some sexy miracle?
Songbirds fill the air with their goddamn tweet tweets and stupid trills and whistles,
Because, you know why?
They have tiny bird-brains.
Crows shall inherit the earth,
Because they know better and they will feed on our decaying corpses while we pat ourselves on our backs
For our clever music and our clever words and our clever pictures and our clever flying machines.
And our clever cleavers and meat-grinders and brass knuckles and our gun-powder--
Our fucking gun-powder…
Caw! Caw!

At the center of the universe is a giant black hole, they say.
And in that black hole, there is a fabulous dance,
The kind of dance in which feet stomp and hands clap,
Hips sway, and pretty girls sashay,
The boys blush like little faggots,
And the girls curse and shout and smoke and spit.
Ah, those pretty girls--
I suppose they’ll get theirs too,
But you never know.
As for me, I’m done for.
Come get me black hole,
Get me if you can,
But I swear, if you do,
I’ll kick your ass,
Slowly,
Relativity, you know.


Roland Seto
October 30 1:55am, 2005