The Astronaut of Waste

My mind hesitated for a while

as we floated through darkness, skirting the craters' rims

in the solar traffic-all waste;

such unharnessed brightness from our bodies

I never saw on Earth-white light, alloy,

escaped from the geometer's cuticle

into the clear, uninhibited nothingness of space.

Drifting from planet to planet, the

gold of our light, the

gold spreading from the sheep's ear, the

gold out of our light, into moronic space,

gold as it is, itself, leaf of

gold, shattered in the master craftsman's grip,

heard in the distance, as the wind's heard,

our preoccupation with gold, forgetting the desiccating

diaphragm,

gold, such as it is, on our planet, on another, in space,

with us, our heads made of white gold, our hearts of gilt, our

souls-waste.

My soul's madness

collides with the functionless,

so fragile it is,

so impudent the strand of the real.

My body has grown stiffer, unable to escape gravity or cope with

my essential sanity;

the dog burns in the alley, laughing kids; burning dog, dependent

on their loud, annoying voices;

dependent bark past a burnt tooth

shoots from brick to brick, into the human code that's my mind;

the lathes up and go, dissatisfied with humanity, into the bag of

the broken gypsy magician

who walks strangely swaying, resolute, the motion of a whole

nebula.

I forget why I do nothing, why the sylvan geometer longs for the

ancient,

dazed in the hydroelectric mist where he and the fish asphyxiate;

I forget who I am, prosperous husband of Danaiis' daughter,

wreathed in the mornings and the evenings on my golden skull,

with bay and laurel, what I think are traditional.

The kids stare over the charred dog;

I wish a better king would come than the present king; I want to

be

inanimate, inanimate,

so I could sit for a still life; I want to photograph it myself in color,

a still life becoming, a still life in motion, beyond hideous space;

I want to be a golden statue lying on its back.

I

want to

be

a golden

statue

lying

on

its back...