The Animal of Infinite Imagination

Proem:

Do you know what genius is
I summon it
It is the jinn
I beckon
With fire and smoke
 
Corruption permeates everything, cracks in everything and the enigma of everything is that it is defined best by its flaws, by what it lacks, what will hurt it, what will destroy it. I would have to fall down and worship if I paused and allowed myself to know and believe that its flaws are its beauty. That its tenderness lies in its vulnerabilities. That these are a gravity against which all things labor, the weakest points, these crack and splinter, fragment and fall away.
 
How does the animal live. It grows strong, strives and abides, grows wise, in the fullness of time, grows weak and besotted, if it lives to the decay of its half-life, when it approaches critical mass in strides of slow putrefaction. Disease is the invisible arm, reaving what we cannot refuse or endure, only bear witness to the pox testament that rises with words of woe and sentences of pain upon the flesh canvas. This denigration in the torpid, but sure progression of tormentuous aches and of these portends, that equally rend. Craft an algorithm of your flesh dissipation and a written trend of the desiccation of reason. Slide into the corner of the floor in the last room you will inhabit. Cut your ruin into the walls.
 
Remember this now, for just a short span, draw me in like breath, and then again, when there is only so much life as exists past the final heartbeat and after the last possible exhalation, when we will live one moment and be swallowed up in death. The slowing of reactions, recollections. It rot stinks the mortal senses, of fear and transformation. The lights dim to a pinpoint. It all lead to this timorous moment of fragility. Timber. Remember this memoir, of the trials and tribulations of he who spoke as the Atlantean. Remember the cracks in everything.
 
..
 
1.
Heartbreak, Ad Nauseum
 
Or
 
Concussions of linear gravity
 
I think I spoke of the moment my vanity broke
Dropped in some careless moment
I was forced to come awake into the shared reality
A catalyst for many resentments, seething beneath the surface
When I became more
Destructive, belligerent, venomous
Perceptions, electromagnetic bonds and emotional attachments
I destroyed them, one by one, not with my hands, but with my heart
A black cloud follows my name, still
And I am considered mercurial, at best
 
Artificial worlds have a paradigm, a definite set of boundaries and laws that govern them. This always fascinated me and I went to great lengths to test those laws of governance. I would make things happen that would utterly baffle the virtual intelligence, which is to say, the predetermined set of reactionary algorithms.
 
Watching these predetermined actions adapt to new situations was like witnessing the birth of new realities. If I could share anything I learned with you, I might choose to share that knowing.
 
I loved watching them destroy themselves
It was a kind of lunatic courage I could not emulate
 
Instead, I hurt from drugs and alcohol, hurt from making fuck stupid decisions
Hurting for a different reason than heartbreak, ad nauseum
 
So, I have a message for you
The good thing about a message is that it waits for you
Not like words on the effluvium
Those come and go
Like we do
 
You say you don't want to hurt me
I want you to not hurt, but if
Needs be
Hurt me
But do not go
I will not relinquish my care quickly or easily
When we part, it will be a loss
 
And you say you don't want to burden me
Burden me
I am ready and able to be
Even when you are irrational
Your mad fingers may
Mold and make
Clay
Of me
That's fine with me, I am
Strong
And remain the same
Myself
 
Thought you are absent
I love you still
The unstoppable rotation of time-space
And how it sings to me
These two
I will hold to love
With the hurt
And burden
That both of these
Sometimes are
 
Freedom, to me, would be never having to ask for anything. That's when I would be free. I loathe being beholden. I want to be totally autonomous. Giant. Cyclops. Titan. I was and am. A towering inferno, burning with the hate madness in part, within the pelagic depths of my unexpressed love, echoes in my compassion to you. Those few who’ve spoken to me.
 
My engine tears through me in concussions of linear gravity. This recollection is more than invention, more than memory, it is the movement of spheres, witnessed across all that has transpired since, to how we arrived here. At this instant. The living translation. I am sometimes here.
 
I am the pharaoh of the underground sea, interlaced with fingers of gently woven light, neither nearer nor farther, than you are to me, at this instant. The molecules are sewn into the muscle fibers. Song bubbles coursing through the oxygen current. What am I? My poems often contain these little puzzles.
 
Clouds flow silently past overhead from the northeast, swift and fluid like curtains, caught on the wind. It was interesting to witness. An enormous crescent moon, the cold makes it appear larger, brings it closer. Sickly yellow in pallor, with all the baleful charm of a reaper's sickle. A single oblong cloud slides over its face, black and heavy shades of gray, sulks like smoke. The kind of moon a witch flies past on a broom.
 
I imagine myself living in an advanced spacecraft, by myself in the cold depths of space with everything I could want. Just me, wanting for nothing, in an endless sea of quiet stars. Sometimes I want to consume all life and float in a clean astral void.
 
Puzzle answer,
Sky full of lonely stars and my aching heart
 
..
 
2.
Memento Mori
 
Or
 
The distortion smiled back at me
 
Beautiful night for a stroll. Silent as those who slumber beneath its still umbra, which are most, at this hour. All is still in the inky depths of night. A chill in the air and clear skies, with an unobstructed view of incoming starlight. Legit.
 
Is everything connected. Beyond cosmology. Are events connected. Are seeming moments of symmetry a chaotic symphony. A poetry of random assemblage. Is this truly a fustian paradox or an arbitrary rubric. A tempest in a teapot, steeped in the irony. You can walk or stick around and witness for yourself. It is immaterial to our personal experience. Draw your own conclusions. I will define myself.
 
It's a lovely night. Have you had a chance to have a gander. What a sight. Immense clouds of a milky red hue. Menacing in their low orbits. Cold without bite. Wind without words. Quiet. Stars, but no moon.
 
Long pants, skullcap, leather jacket, the man all in black feels quite encumbered on a cold and windy winter's night. Time seems to wander off on its own for a while and passes weirdly disjointed from me. Lost in thoughts.
 
Wind turns gusty, but feels nice in all this armor.
 
My strides are sure, even for the low light afforded by moon and stars in this favored hour before dawn. Left hand holding the mp3 player, right arm is closest to the foliage, swings loose and free. My arm touches a long, soft leaf and in the instant of that brief contact, a lady bug is there, is still for just one more beat, and then begins to crawl down my arm. My canter is uninterrupted, I am instilled with the depths of the music. Five more strides forward and my arm brushes another slightly lower leaf, in that instant, the ladybug steps onto it and we part ways, from step to step, leaf to leaf, without pause, in the span of a few heartbeats. Brings this treasured passage to mind.
 
Longing for the unknown
I have seen the face of God
In the briefest of moments
When I was humbled
By the depth of beauty
By shameful defeats
By the enormity of life itself..
 
Time passes, the bright moon is shrouded, its light diffuse. There is a motionless but pervasive fog, as if the waking world were wrapped still in that gravitas, ill at ease of some unremembered dream. Perhaps a distemper brought on by the continental clash of seasons, manifest in this confusion of air pressure and distortion of vapors, humid as a bog, with the menace of some miasma. Some remembered obloquy that hung about my nostrils in the blackest hour before dawn.
 
Lonely feels like pulling your grilled cheese sandwich apart and those long sagging strings say :/ Feels like broken cobwebs fingers trailing in a light, steady breeze. Tastes like nothing in the fridge. Looks like darkness in a quiet room.
 
Fingers that play silently, violently across the strings of a violin. Lips that pantomime words in a tremulous moment of sleep, observed by those deaf to the images that play behind curtains and beneath sheets. Fingers that grasp at nothing. The shadow of an eye, slanting downward in low background light through a vacant doorway. Yes, I'm here.
 
Stood at the foot of the basin, gazing downward, smiling into the sparkling waters. The distortion smiled back at me. Remember that you must die, it almost whispers, through it's wavering, pantomime expression. We contemplate each other and for a moment, neither of us were solitary.
 
..
 
3.
Synthesis
 
Or
 
Sun thesis
 
I was out the door almost as soon as I woke. 8am on the dot, boots on the avenue. Warm sunlight, but the air still retains a bit of evening chill. This contrast pleases me.
 
Cars whir past, there is a patch of fresh cement I consider putting my mark upon, but just divert around into the grass. Take the crosswalk at the far end like usual, bout a mile out and a half hour from home.
 
Enormous blue gray cloud bank from the northeast moves southwest, away from me. It anthropomorphizes to the movement of some mammoth herd, a shroud of dust upon their passage across the plains.
 
Ground glass sparkles in the gray black asphalt like ersatz stars shining in a faux night sky. Reminds me of when I used to lie in the yard and clutch the grass ceiling in terror of falling into the blue abyssal. I was sure I would lose my grip and those chaotic winds would buffet me with force and insanity to god knows what hell oblivion.
 
These are the musings of one like you and what you experience, it seems also, you love and dread much the same things, yet are distinct and unique. This contrast amuses me. I, the animal of infinite imagination, yet unable to define the simplest things around me in any real, tangible way. Gob smacked by the inadequacies of the mind that lay beneath these senses and the failure of these sentences to capture the living moment.
 
I understood something about maturity and who had been displaying it. Sometimes it, sometimes us. Looked on with some measure of emotion as it dawned upon me that her love was her pity for me, for her own reasons. It could only be that I had been eclipsed by a greater spirit for a moment as it crossed our orbit. Something cleaner than this disease through which we labor. Something more solid brilliant than this.
 
Some of us look back and try to find meaning and the lessons held within the passage of time. Some of us look forward with anticipation and a hopeful heart, full of ambition and the promise of new discovery. Still others pass from one day to the next, placing little importance on the demarcation and delineation of time. I prefer to be left in peace, within the quietude of my solitude.
 
Days blur together, colors blended on a canvas, bleeding into one another. Steady winds converged from the north, south and east, the eastern wind prevailing overall. Sometimes it smells of the sea, but there was a hint of fire in the air, another pleasing aspect of the season. Low clouds obscure much of the night sky, no moon, a single visible star, directly overhead.
 
Wind ripples the flags, draws lines in the oval reflection of a street light on the waters of a reservoir I pass, pausing to appreciate the moment and always to mourn it's impermanence.
 
Kept on the hoof, alone with my music and whine of wind in the pauses. Sat in the dark, time sifts through my fingers with a touch of spirit. Cold but present against my face and shoulders in the low hours before dawn. Unfathomable. Intangible. Space and time part ways as recollection dominates and minutes pass oblivious to my knowing, focused on a photograph. Clouds part to reveal the bounty of the night sky. I look around, but the moon is hiding.
 
It's cold, but it doesn't touch me. The night seems illuminated, even where there is no visible light present. I move mechanically upon my feet as if in a dream, in solemn expectation of waking.
 
I’ve parted ways with many. New friends, lifelong friends. My life is defined by its departures, accented by the pain and abandonment I have left in my wake. I imagine it must be odious for others to be in my presence when they are aware of my indiscretions, but I know little of theirs.
 
Drove over to a friend's house the other night, a decent stretch south along the road. Street lights amber glare slides off the convex surface of the windshield, stars in the sky, night full of pretty lights, glance at the faces of passing motorists, lost in the moment, focused on the task at hand, chatting with animated gesticulations and expressions, minds a buzz, ever agape, aghast, on the verge of ultraviolence, like my own.
 
Sitting at a light, still a bit lit from earlier, my focus shifted inward, electricity arched along the length and breadth of my cerebellum and for a couple short minutes, I watched the town racing from its primordial foundations into what it is now and beyond, dirt tracks usurped by soil and crushed stone aggregate, tar and asphalt replacing those. Wood and pitch, replaced with plaster, and polymer plastics, flexible and yet stronger than steel.
 
Wind buffets the car in its motions, a cumuliform cloudscape begins to disperse rain, soft and cool. I watched its angular progress move through passing lights, watched the moon, shedding blue white lunar light, watched pedestrians with hunched shoulders and lowered brows, smiled when one raised her chin and extended tongue, that's more like it. I make waves in the wind with fingers and palm, keep on keepin on down the road.
 
As your friendly neighborhood genius/madman I can assure you of a few things. All of this could be occurring in a petri dish for all we know or could be a random firing of protons and electrons across a paradigm of such exquisite circumstance, that the odds of anything like this occurring again are beyond my comprehension.
 
Either way, or in any event, this tiny world that we share, sucking in breaths and tucking back bits of breech wind in polite company, is a college of absurdities, presented as standards and absolute certainties, all so that we can passably conform to the shape of each other.
 
So draw your lines in the sand. I will draw mine and hopefully along the way, those lines will intersect and something greater than you or I will emerge. A sum of the individual parts, an artistry of wondrous oddity and perfectly random absurdity, becoming a whole that is better and more beautiful than we could possibly have been alone.
 
You also are the animal of infinite imagination. There is only a velocity if there is a force. We are trapped in a decaying orbit of each other. This is our purpose. Forces that are equal in magnitude and opposite in direction. This embrace. The acceleration of an object is dependent upon both force and mass. To know each other within the confines of Newtonian law. Planet to planet. The object of smaller mass receives the most acceleration. To destroy each other. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Suns converging in an act of nuclear fission, synthesis, you, us, your awareness, and I who lives beyond the ken of this composition. This time and place. Now. Sun thesis. You and I, here, upon the astral bridge where our minds meet. Where our hearts collide. Broken and whole together.
..
 
Coda:
 
Do you know what genius is
John Lennon did
I am enthralled to it
To the harmonious mathematics of the universe
It is the jinn
It is the universe
I bow before
The celestial spheres
Wreathed in fire and smoke
 
Corruption permeates everything, cracks in everything and the enigma of everything is that it was defined best by its flaws, by what it lacked, what could hurt it, and what destroyed it. I will fall down and worship as I pause and allow myself to know and believe that its flaws are its beauty. That its tenderness lies in its vulnerabilities. Space. Time. These are a gravity against which all things labor, the weakest points, these crack and splinter, fragment and fall away, but that which is immortal had residence within this essentially hollow atomic shell. My voice. My heart. That which is immortal, remains.
 
How does the animal die. It grows weary, slows and abides, grows weak and besotted, in the fullness of time, is rendered into its constituent elements. It has lived to the decay of its half-life. It has reached its critical mass, crossed the final threshold of slow putrefaction. Remembrance is the invisible arm, denying what we could not refuse or endure, only bear witness to. The pox testament that rose with words of woe and sentences of pain upon the flesh canvas, has also been consumed. This denigration in the torpid, but sure progression of tormentuous aches and of these portends, that equally end. Craft an algorithm of your unending energetic transformation and a written trend of the awesome magnitude of reason. Rise now from the corner of the floor in the last room that was your prison. Immortal. Sing your emancipation into the walls.
 
Remember me now, for just a short span, draw me in to your most intimate circle, discard me, when there is only so much time as exists past this final embrace and after the last possible communion, when we will live one moment and be swallowed up in the great black singularity. The slowing of chemical reactions, synaptic responses, when the neural network dims and neurons cease their electric firings. It rot stinks the immortal senses, of fear and transformation. The lights rise to a crescendo. It all lead to this timorous moment of eternity. Remember me, then. Immortal. Titan. Rest upon the tines of my trident. Ride the currents of my lightning into the ground where I lie. Remember this manifesto, of the trials and triumphs of he who spoke as the Atlantean. Remember the cracks in everything.
 
The Animal of Infinite Imagination
Or
Eclipsed by a greater spirit
 
By
Daniel Christensen
Writing as
The Fire Elemental