Nocturnes: Where Next---Faster Than Thought

Faster than light was ten thousand lifetimes ago;
father than thought, a hundred lifetimes;
since then, the galaxy has swung back around
where it was when we abandoned the flesh,
and became the more selfish for doing so
because we had to have it all---
we had to experience it;
to possess it;
to preserve it
in secured archives, past words protected.

Too much for us, this endless cascade;
it was all too much, a surplus only briefly sampled.
Time, as the moment experienced,
cannot keep up with faster than thought;
and we grow dizzy at the array that surrounds us---
too much faster than thought.
Imagine: all the stars of the whole universe
were suddenly set in ranks before us---
dazzling us, dizzying us, perhaps even nauseating us
(that is, the rush, the thrill, nauseating us).
But cosmic law does not allow for that,
and obviously for good reason.

Do you remember, lifetimes ago, when we
went back, together, to the old homeplace?---
long abandoned by most of us
(and most of us scorned our desire to visit)---
that obscure blue planet, orbiting a minor, yellow star;
an unworthy origin for such accomplished beings,
who ride the crests of our achievements,
who ride the height of the peaks of our desires and choices---
faster than thought after ten thousand lifetimes ago.
Despite the hilarity of others, we went.
We had the whole place to ourselves.
"Do you think," you asked, your voice
sultry in my mind, "we could put on flesh?"
My breath would have caught in my throat had I one.
"Yes," I said, "We can 'get corporeal.'"
"Adolescents?" you asked, "to feel discovery's brink, again?
"You arrange the details. You studied the histories."

Yes, in the days of my education, I studied the histories.
We became male and female, of the early twenty-first;
clad in shirts they called polo, and breaches they called jeans;
barefoot to feel the grassy terrain beneath our feet.
Our long hair, blonde with a tint of redness, blew in the
gentle breeze that moved white clouds across the blue sky.

My poor words could not have described
the beauty you had created around yourself.
Hand in hand we wandered, slowly, prolonging it,
no longer faster than thought. And the touch of your warm hand,
your fingers intertwined with mine, was erotic
and dirty, at the same time, because so many would have laughed.

The planet was a vast, verdant garden of greens and golds
adorned by all the other colors of the spectrum.
Once, our ancestors had ravaged it to the barren stone;
and when that was not enough for them, they departed---
faster than light, in that time before faster than thought.
The planet, like a corporeal body at last free of infection,
began to recover; and to devolve, not evolve,
back to its original form---a garden planted between rivers.
And in a small grove we discovered,
a private, protective place, seeming to wait for us.

We sprawled out casually. With new, nervous fingertips
I traced random patterns on your grass-stained soles,
as you squirmed and sign provocatively.
Then, lips and tongues like unaccustomered instruments,
I kissed each one of your toes repeatedly.
Then we teased each other by slowly removing the clothes.
Naked, we embraced, in the manner of men and women
in the days before faster than light and faster than thought.
You received and guided me into the penetralia
of your corporeal self. Contemporary thoughts
gave way to the ancient instincts,

like that first couple, naked and alone
in a garden that has been replicated here
(probably from some of the same genetic matter).
Friction became far more than a mere concept of physics;
friction became its own purpose and delight.
These corporeal forms needed no instructions at all.
They seemed to know all of the variations . . .
until an explosion---like stars bursting into nebulae---
surged out of me and into you, in seven waves of pleasure.

Oh yes, I, too, would like to visit there again.
I, too, would once again put off this faster than thought
and take on a body, that body, slower than thought,
but expert in every intimate bliss.
But you need not fear the mockery of our friends;
the whispered insults---like "throwback" and "primitive brutes."
The galaxy has rotated a little further since that sole visit:
the homeplace---the origin---the blue planet
has been engulfed, and burned to atoms,
by its minor star, one of the countless minors,

now dying, crimson and swollen.

Starward

[jlc]