Monday 18 July 2016

Relic Environments Trilogy: Book I, Part 1.xv



from Book I, Part 1, Mystery Tramp Eclogues

Age of Monsters 

A finger-prick draws blood
at thirty thousand feet, asking,
Is it safe up here, a sugar-romp then sickness,
or maybe safer lower down, blood sugar bumpy,
the glucose strip an altitude check…

here on the redeye, L.A. to New York, the pump
jacking insulin, a sick Jew maintaining middle life,
a discreet remote
to close the loop, telling how much, and when.

The screw of pressure indicates the change,
altimeter up, or down: that’s the catch.

When I check my sugar, I see the past,
a reading of conditions a few minutes gone, the insulin
not hitting for another thirty.

Last summer in the desert, near Elroy
on the Santa Cruz flats, a carbon decay-pulse
confirmed the age of monster bones.

How far is then – as high as now?

…It was all in my report…

Clearing time zones, waiting for the kick
to separate the colours in my head – corn gold, blues,
a snakebite voltage discharged across
the sky’s emulsion –

the genealogy ends here, in memory, in dreams,
or where dreams were, this lizard spoil of baited tech
deep as the ash at Birkeneau, the fires,
my parents, earthed
on humming wires.

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