Two Poems

Lake Nyasa A razor-blade of starlight makes a tear at the hairline. Then the sand-bound shore begins to fill in with the pink contagion of the dawn. This scene is quiet, unbegun. A glint reveals a jackknife, so you pull out a gun, but then the beach is empty. You stand, become the only thing within the field. This pleasure means the sun is rising, and you're the only one it warms. Dawn and the wide breeze, the massive pastel vista of big blue Lake Nyasa. A young man swims into the morning pool of induced blue. Below him are the lives that now are full of water. He treads the empty coma. He smiles in the starlight as the water curls around him. He knows he made himself a torus. Other living things appear. Even this soon after daybreak, a conglomerate of flies, a coiling funnel pouring down itself, expands, moves off of the horizon. Every living thing remote and programmed to come closer. He treads water blankly, legs imitating an egg-beater, and smoothing out the water with his hands. The blue wide ripple, razure of oblivion, spread out around him waving in the vacuum. The whole world changes, and the day declines, sky draining into sun slowly churning blue into a red that falls across the eyes.   Theology The image appears in the crafted glass. The same image that will shrink to fill a contact lens. The same terror in an instant of losing irretrievably an heirloom. It’s only natural. Stars recede from the expectation of a billion gazes. But everything is stored. The night returns restored, projected from the data. Behind the screen the algorithm (soon to graduate to etiquette) reveals the folk inside the medium. Women who photograph themselves and upload their dust into a cloud. Seeded, these banks of clouds will fill— each particulate of dust, each pearl congealing. Theology, the study of dark matter, conclusively has proven the well of hell is Zero Kelvin. Movement ceases, molecules foetally curl into themselves. And at the lowest circle of our galaxy a black hole squats. O wondrous Goatse of another realm. Radio source, mass of four million suns, beams out pure revelation. Cults worship at its altar. The faithful pray: Do not leave your house. Sit quietly and listen. An LED illuminates the ether in the vitrine. And models show the diodes rapidly receding and the backlit screen expanding, and the transudation, and something dug up from deep within that will not act and will not leave, a thing that makes a truce with space, a relic of the underworld.