Canto CXI

This isn’t some kind of metaphor. Goddamn, this is real!

We are camped out in Jen’s house. The entire party in disarray:

the botanist compulsively making sketches of every flower he can remember. Our biologist has decided that persons as small as we are cannot exist. Plaintively she asks if we might possibly wear stilts, or lifts, or just stand up straight so we could be tall enough to ride in good sensible taxonomy.

The cartographer considers a 1:1 map for us to live inside.

I am tied spread-eagle to Jen’s palm as with the other hand she removes a book from the shelf and opens it. Another explorer. She says that for a while she thought the author was a robot.

She had an elaborate mythology about him: that he was not human at all but a robot sent to observe humanity from another star. But something had happened when the author entered our atmosphere, some kind of cosmic fuck-up and now he just sees everything and can’t make sense of any of it. He was fueled by amphetamines and foot-long chili dogs. Sometimes the robot would try to beam back what he had seen but it was garbled through a haze of speed and finely-ground spiced hamburger. And thus: his poems. She said she didn’t believe that any more. She holds me over the cover of the book. I feel the heat of her palm against my back. I am trying to tell you. I am trying to explain myself. Her pinky twitches and moves my right arm. I swear I am trying to tell you about a new country. She opens the book and begins to read.

LXVI. At the mouth of a coal mine we found what the people here call a Rubik’s Cube.

In an alleyway behind a restaurant, guarded by dumpsters, we found a tennis ball on which someone had written YOU.

In the towering mists that spewed from a condenser high atop the king’s kitchen, we found several jacks.

We have given them to our Brobingnagian porter. Her name is Jen. She hints at another life. Her hands are soft. They do not speak of labor.

LXV.

We are posting our last wills and testaments on Tik Tok with a soundtrack by Richard Wagner sped up 16%.

To my beloved Annabell, this is cat food. The cats here are the size of Shetland ponies, and the Shetland ponies are the size of buses. This cat food may look normal dry food

but within lies a succulent, soft, meaty center. It is like my love for you. It is much to consider.

To Robert: this cat toy, the size of a corgi, is full of a soporific the likes of which could spavin every tiger in Bengal. Deep indica, to be used sparingly.

I save for you these notes. It seems as though the storm is slackening and we can leave this pet store. Outside the buses run again, are the size of thunderclouds, they are full of electricity and fire and boredom and need.

LXIV.