X.

The pale fire of remote stars flickers, John C is
immersed in a vision of past rewound, reviled.
He dies with crap in hand, survives as an idea.
The Titian painting of choice has lost is focus.

The horizon is blackstar-lit, an out-of-body Goddess
stares from mid-distance, once more he has forgotten
the words of Artemis, and an old Etruscan promise
has once more been forsaken, at least for this life.

XI.

His eyes come back to seeing, there is a light
tremor in them, the tremor of desperate choices.
Up above, the limit-blue sky is oppressed by
multiple swarms of hookah-starved mantis-stars.

“the ship burns, and the vision ends.
Now I am utterly alone. This is Titan’s Sotra Facula
region. On my left, the Doom Mons peak rises,
the image of the sacred montain of a Goddess.”

XII.

“On my right, a giant pit. Radio waves through
the hydrocarbon haze picked up by my lilting
soul spacesuit. Terrestrians merry-making at the
year’s festival of love, bidding good-bye to the

flesh with masks and armies of glass beads.
The sacred mountain siren-calls, the methane
whispers, I must be losing my plot. I’m running
a nitrogen-fueled fever, I close my eyes and”

XIII.

“I see the shadow of Artemis, I open my eyes
and burst! rising with a smile to love me; it’s
a fantasy of my own making. I have imagined
myself out of this world on multiple occasions.

Close your mind, the nightmare will melt.
On this mountain, I have buried my father.
In this pit, the bones of all the people I once
knew. In the snow, a distant memory. A cat.”

XIV.

“There is a Goddess in the sky, and she is
calling my name, holding the cat in her arms.
I do not know my name, yet I know she is
harking me. I do not know who she is, and

yet I am familiar with this purple sense of
time and space. I am well-acquainted with
this dream, though I can’t see its colours,
nor hear a sound in this cubical silence.”