The only way is forward, but wisdom can be extracted
A feat most painful, Arion in old age looks backward
to the days on Solaris, to his former lover Kyniska,
before he escaped in a tin pod, before the explosions,

before they were dispersed into oblivion by the empire
before delusions overpowered them, before the
permanent sleep of Kyniska, before the delusions of

her sleep. He recalls his many nightmares, the engine

sound the only sound he could distinguish for days
for weeks, for months, that was a recurrent nightmare

The veil nebula hovered midinterstellar
in the dream he kept on walking, it was an earth June
the planet was spinning but everything had ground to
a nothing.

In the cut, flowers hanging while a song played
over and over again.

In the dead of heat, he had observed
the window’s perfect stillness, he had

remembered, not forgotten the room of
his illness, from deep-space, from the tin pod he could see
the rebel-aliens, Solaris reducing
its size smaller and smaller
until the vanishing, the banishing

hornet-filled anger passing
came hurling as tumour
solidarity would die
a cadaver obstacle among us

Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes
a gift had been found
inter poenas et tormenta

In Stoke Poges, many a gem – full

In Aquae Sulis, the fall of the balcony of a man
he barely knew. The dead live on, in night-mares.
Serpents rise from the deep, coming ashore
unless you give me your own true love
in the chambers of the sea, till human voices

memories of his days with his former companions

the soldier woke up back on Enceladus
in the service of the empire
he wakes up from a nightmare, too
they had been drugged; he walks corridors of ice
in the castle snow nor packed nor groomed,
the impression of temper, the cosmos
the wrongful accusation of icicles

Kyniska in her deep sleep wakes up and screams,

her nightmare is cats on a hill, a castle by the sea, her bed burning,
the red chest of a robin burning deep into the night
in the universe, at that time, and at that space,
the outcast were not citizens – that’s not right, Kyniska knows

“it’s all so damn wrong, I am willing to clean toilets,
to work in a sugar-caning factory, to lay waste to academic
studies, to be a renegade, to throw aside all reason, to be
different, to be special, to be successful one must destroy all links to
civilization; therefore I will renege all there is to renege
I will be come a fundamental denier, I will deal in absolutes
I will see the desert and the light, the serpent shall dictate
my beliefs,

I believe in Moby Dick, in the search
I believe in crashing out of civilization
I believe in the destruction of the empire
I believe in the good savage
I deny the existence of the ideal defunct
I choose to believe that mutilating women is for their protection…”

How beautiful, the rage in youth
The absolutes, the idealistic folly,
and the resulting muscular dystrophy
when God refuses to accept what you have become

Long before that, in some deep forest infected by disease,

mosquitoes storming their bed of love
Arion and Kyniska in another age had been mating
and from the bushes, an old woman had been spying on them

But now Kyniska dreams in permanent sleep, locked in a tower
the empire retains her body and feeds her intravenously,
in her dream she rages into a new-found and new-lost religion.

Arion from the future looks back many hundred years
one of the first most religious, most Anglo-Nixon poets was buried at Whitby.
In old age, Arion hence lives in seclusion, surrounded by slaves
hiding far and away, chased by his former rebel-companions,
far forward in shadow lines, he looks back to his days in a tin pod,
when he was flashing back and flashing forward, when travelling up the river
he had been waiting;

he presently saw a star, and then he saw

the break of multiple interstellar days
he wish’d he could stop flying away, catching a billion billion tears
and every one that had been linked to betrayal and abandonment
in his sorry existence would be endlessly looping on his mind,

and so from his tin pod, he would endlessly wander-cross
because something must make you run
a rolling interstellar medium catches no moss

now that’s a dominant source of energy, it forms the stars
in the flow of baryons we all vanish , the invisible dark matter
is collisionless, and so are our emotions, our memories
the visible nature of our lives is

derived from fusion between stars
and also derived from the the release of gravitational love in accretion disks
around black holes, where we spend most of our lives spinning
around in circles, like a loopy song that’s caught in the net of our mind,

again and again it sings

our human lives are evolving as gas evolves to stars
some part of interstellar gas may be ejected
from the veil nebula and other galaxies
in the form of galactic winds, and that’s what pushes this tin pod

effortlessly
through the horror and the moral terror.

Now, you – friend to woman,
dig up her bones, friend!

“You! Hypocrite lecteur! – mon semblable, -mon frère!”