No Body

Perhaps a poem today. This one was actually originally published as a very short story in Quantum Genre in the Planet of the Arts (ed. V. Ulea, 2009), but I think I like it better as a poem.  It's actually where I used the word "Mindfingers" which, of course, became the name of this blog.  Stupid name.  Pretentious.  Anyway, enjoy.

NO BODY

No Body, I call me now.

No high-school sweethearts think of where I am now as they lie ruminating one night. 

No workers gossip about me in furtive morning coffee huddles.

No secret agent discusses my name with raised eyebrow on the sixth floor of a nondescript square building. 

Getzel Ternell, government clerk, bachelor, 35.

I whisper my existence in the urban cacophony.

I'm convinced I'm disappearing.

I slouch at the cluttered kitchen table with flimsy metal legs,

Pour cream into my coffee.

I consider patterns.  Patterns within patterns. 

Entropy is cream in an unstirred cup of coffee,

the tendrils of white softly curling,

each tendril producing smaller appendages and repeating itself over and over,

the intricacy staggering and beautiful. 

The design reminds me of a vast, leafless oak on a winter plain, or the ganglion net of a brain. 

Eventually the dancing back eddies of the cream coalesce, diffuse to mere colour, dead uniformity.

We are back eddies in the tide of entropy. 

I feel the psychic tendrils of others lose purchase as I immaterialize. 

Puzzled, their mindfingers search for me momentarily like the pseudopods of hungry amoebae. 

Humans are increasingly irrelevant. 

Their sounds are like the utterances of cattle, 

as if every word is spoken out of context from the one before it. 

I come to un-understand people, their reactions to given phenomena.

Time becomes distorted,

The waterfalls are languid as clouds,

the life spans of stars are cracks from dry wood in a campfire.

I am many places simultaneously. 

My edges have become fuzzy. 

Dust crawls at my feet, if it can be said that I have feet, if it can be said that there is dust.

This is how I see the humans now:

A vast beach stretching to three horizons

Seven billion bodies planted up to the neck in the sand,

Faces able only to see those close around them,

Behind them the jagged slow tide comes in to end them, one by one.

Do they scream?

No.  They sing.

They sing.

Ahead lies a fecund oblivion,

an abyss made out of everything. 

I can just about touch it. 

And here is the mystery: 

I can't reach it without letting go,

but once I let go, I lose all desire to reach.