Many of you out there
will have encountered a world of calamity and ruin
with one last gasp at the end of it
     and clearly labelled the instructions:
            “this Day the Suprise Transport”
      “port Saild from this”
      and so on.
Not on our planet   
      yet still
      that destination lingers –  
      terminus,
“animae viles, a sort of
excrementitious mass, that could be projected,
and accordingly was projected –  ”
      as detritus, cast “from the depth of a shipwreck”
floundering in the blast of an abandoned broadcast –
“Sudden effluvial aftermath here. Have encountered
daze without number . . .” – doomed
      emission, vast dump “which departs from itself”
            as a wheezed, unavoidable, looming
      exhalation – insidious galactic bloom
whose drift is a swift mutation aboard that
soundtrack lumbering in the background,
      strange clank or muffled boom
heralding a dank impending cloudbank possibly
or black-and-white photograph taken on the moon,
      featuring I, quaint blip,  
           feinted relic ’mid dim reverberations
      e.g. ghost in portalled tomb
whose blundered destination
plunges on – old death throes
       rattle in the deep,
where the dice cup heaves up sleep I’m leaving.

Denizens, sensitive as always, I remain
captain of the spaceship

“Isle of Destolation”
creepily dotted about my photo – where it roams,
approximations of despair breathing malice
      pass by in the wake of an interest
      I no longer maintain, who fondly recall  
how to comb myself and shave my hair
and park my coat and hat in the hall.
      Sincerely I resemble all those
who have written to me with letters of condolence,
whether edifice or orifice, bit or whole.
      “Though alien drones and foreign hums
      within me thrive . . . ”
strange feeling of sudden distinction was creeping upon me
      convinced of its authenticity,

      spurting up like a hideous gas
      and the whole mass imploding
      into its own brief fumes.

      Oddly,
      I began my radio career
      as a swarm of bees.

      Some still speak of it
      and I go on and on about it,
      as befits my condition.
      For example, this transmission explains
      why someone of approximately my own
                  age and intelligence suddenly
            led me across the large laboratory,
Firkon, Zuhl and the others all following.
Frankly I could have disintegrated
in a pilot’s suit of the same style
                  “whereby hangs
            an immense bridge”
      chomping away at the background

      as we reached the platform.
Firkon suggested looking down into the elevator shaft
      “Notice anything? ”
and when I did, saw three
more floors or deck
levels below.
      “At each level
            a bridge or balcony . . .”

      projected into the shaft contra-indicating the gap
           dome of saucer
                  between    
            “analogy of the abyss”
      and his tautology
hovered outrageously above it.
“We use rudder-post technology to detach the post and
            reinsert it on a short staff carried by a frame –
     Welcome, 260 thousand cubic centimetres.”

            At once, I clambered aboard and found
that taste of his butthole strangely hypnotic
whine of the motor gained in pitch like a twanging ’cello string.
      Spike took up the “How long must I wait? I mean – ”
       . . .
      A tremor ran through the hull of the Moonraker . . .
A pencil fell from the instrument ta . . .    
            “I – I’m not sure . . .

      Always together in this darned silence,
            midground hard to determine between

            both and neither,
      column and house.”

(I could see right away what these things had in common:
            they were all crap. I decided to demonstrate this
      by tying strings between various objects.)

                                    “My first
                              close-up
                                          shot of the moon
                                                            filled me with cold foreboding”
                                                                                           – i.e.
                                                                            stillness, a lack
                                                            of “Thank you”
                  amid the harsh glare of remnants,
bright greys and sooty
      blacks,

            the jagged,
                        razor-sharp outlines of the crags –

                                    and no living thing but me,
                                                      crater.

            “I? But I am an expert! I have so much to discover!
      My ‘shallow cell’ theory – ”

      a twelve-foot cylinder mounted on two
            pairs of caterpillar tracks

            glanced to the left, in the direction of the pit.
From this I could disappear into a narrow, walled valley several miles away.
Suddenly,

                  there I was, ethereal vapour
     trails cut deep between the intermittent static
            dispatched amid stygian fumes
                  his only glue
                  then split.