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They said: There is the eye of the citizens · bystander · belligerent · blameless ·blamed whose history has colonized the captured · in the distance created by time · and there is the eye of the · actual photographer (Gina Apostol)
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Every channel is News at Eight repeating infinitely. Another insolvent country declares their intentions to be closer to the stars. A satellite is launched. Annexation begins indefinitely. Breaking: every body avoids katabasis if they can help it because descension is the inversion of flight. The invader’s military retreat from their occupied zones is one inevitability. One missile obliterates the nameless farmers off the international stage almost instantly. Still, Typhoon Amaterasu begins to sink not soon enough over what is left of Indonesia. On the right the sun is setting across the Matterhorn and the sky is inflamed, is incredible. And below, those indigenous islands still are smoking whenever the dinner trolley passes down intimately. Inanna is an answer to a question on mortality they spot on the seat in front. They have made so many trips from the interior of a country down towards their coasts, and it is just all so intuitive. Thirst, the promise of water, leads to life eventually. So they switch it all off; plead for a refill. Ignore it. Inconsequential. Insubstantial. Incomprehensible. Yet in that dark reflection on their screen, their necklace smuggled with lapis lazuli glows like an ingot, incites a rash on their neck, invites another story into this costly domain.
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‘One offal omen
when I witness a nymph semi-living splutter up against the Saran Wrap of my in-flight exotic fruit salad repeatedly
How many emperors might crumble in the time to drive my head through this reinforced windowpane I lean on
Like that moribund fly I guzzle up the condensation of the aluminium cover to taste the uncanny peeled sweat of the machine
Main sacrifice:
two tasteless balls of lumpen white meat in an ethnic sauce the shade of terracotta to which I add enough salt to kill then preserve a body
What poor beasts were these lumps cut out from: two scoops of the liver the hips the ovaries the eyes
A bad dream
I could fall in love with this necrotravel and its everlasting flight
The comfort-class company of the riverboat ferry turned cargo turned warship, the locomotive train, the spitfire and the drone
Is it a surprise then that I survive like this, wearing bodies like scalding hand towels
There is a small kick to think I can reminisce the sound of date pits falling onto gold platters still
weekend getaways to guess where the palm trees once gossiped in the Hanging Gardens of Babylon
back in the days of my empire, timeshares in China, watch two imported white tigers forced to mate, male slaves in our garden playing the harp
testosterone in the vines mixed with the scent of blood, Springtime, eyes closed
necks out, spice in the breeze, executions in the sunlight, tang of death from the rotting flesh or fruit perfume
just another eternal day in his kingdom
No! All that was ancient history? Here is the divine booming interruption of a bulletin. Our pilot invites in the turbulence: abnormal
storms seize the white skin over our metal exterior
while to my right that child squirms in his seat like a quarry in its cage, eyes as wide as dessert spoons
as sunken as two lakes on a mountain
So lucky you were not born a girl, back in my day
Eight minutes later the call for a doctor spurts out and the pale cabin crew materialise among us in an instant
like spirits of the dead
We think we can see the patient four rows in front
one large male shape half contorted half transmuting into a mass-produced figurine
migrating earth with either too much or too little brown sugar
his meek groans in the face of death escape his small pursed lips like a whistle
a slither of steam leaves the ground
a soul lost at the moment when an American turns around to ask
Do you think he has brought something contagious back
from his homeland?
But really all the minor will witness is a stranger jab a pen into that man’s sponge
flesh which seems to pull all surrounding sound inwards
flesh that bubbles like a secret stale soufflé
flesh like the hushed opening of a bomb, and for a second, I expected something terrible
as if I was still narrating in a long age of monsters and flashy heroes
After modernity I am quick to learn that everything continues with no epic nor lesser consequence
There was: the white noise after the disturbance only, as a blanket is pulled over that man who could be dead or just sleeping only, his overhead light turned offonly, right leg locked towards the aisle outwards only
like a hitch-hiker hailing down another realm
I saw that sock spitefully picked out by his wife two sizes too small tighten its leisure grip on one drumstick leg and leave its puffy gnaw of polyester teeth behind
grey limb swollen like a kink in a grey river
Our pilot did not lie
we soon shook in that space like slack atoms
Something large and classical activated inside me
Every potential flay of lightning
linked to a memory of broiled skin breaking out once struck
a punishment for the foreign insurgents I witnessed many times at the side of my King in my first Arabian life
When the body of our plane’s shadow overwhelmed the body of the lake
on the screen
I dreamt of a giant man, a leviathan
tearing into this steamed vehicle’s roof as if it were the bulging lid of a ready meal in the microwave
How disappointing
only to find a line of ants inside calmly crawling on the carpet towards those exit doors that in the dark, that in the smoke, grows like a portal
like a black TV box
like a mouth
like a hole that will never be closed
Thank any God, our emergency is celestially authorised
And we begin our slow volatile descent over a mountain range somewhere between two colossal, two cruel continents’
Artwork © Benjamin Thomas
