Let Them Eat Space
as if the world, the air, the universe is a cake, studded with the bits of all there is—
fruits, nuts, flesh, discrete droplets of various fluids, hints of things and
lives long gone, mostly not mixing, and many of these pieces
are portals, knock twice and enter another cake-iverse
the difference tween batter and dough, form and function,
each ingredient–flour, eggs, leavening, etc.—with its own origins and changes,
time croissants, cakes within each ingredient, multi-flavor spectra of motion,
content, history; new elements showing up from outside or deep in:
seed crosses doorway and becomes a tree, tree becomes two by fours,
house removed by a flood of water or time, cake/pudding/loaf/mountain
all the way around and through whether seen from window, on a screen,
from a satellite, through micro-or tele-scope–what’s it look like it would taste
moments when the grain, the density, the crumb expands slightly,
hints of movement within, other screens/cakes/lives,
someone looking back at or through me
depending on magnification, focus, what wavelengths register
to those other eyes, guessing a whole from a fragment, a figment.
galactic anthropologists, astronomers looking in and through
the earth’s center, such compressed energetic chaotic patterns—
gods in there, dogs in there, eternal snowflakes, time elapse beaches
start with I, if it is in, in fin it–would there be cake with no one to eat it
I think this while vacuuming, see it staring at a wall, the smell of sunlight,
sounds I discern when holding my breath or with my head underwater
or bare feet on a summer sidewalk, my hand will be back soon
my lungs are weightless cakes
how can there be circulation without everything flowing apart
something’s got to firm among the waves and winds, seismic shifts.
are oceans and atmosphere the two faces of what kind of coin, what science,
clouds in the sky, pockets of ocean with more air than h20 can explain
hold your water, hold your breath, cake r squared, no layers
but larger pans, porous barriers, air with a sweet tooth, giant ovens
burning sugar cane, wheat chaff and egg shells, burning physics
and chemistry textbooks, not stars but nuclear raisins.
what comes out of the oven we never put anything into
when the big bang timer rang?
staring into the sky beyond the sky until I cloud into particles
out here’s not vacuum but a context our bodies aren’t ready for
we cannot eat here, the sun sending a tsunami buffet of uncertainty
I’m holding this moment into the chunky lights of gravity and rain
but it soon escapes; I mix a teaspoon of juice with a teaspoon of stuff–
entrepreneurs and judges are turning this way, envisioning dessert
.
Stink Eye Magazine 