thomas pynchon – poems 2 die for

K2 V2

sounds
like a breakfast
cereal but

that
a fatal mistake
much suffered
in the making

and me
soaring to the summit
on the blithe
stupidity
of imagination

find myself
reading that confounding
gravity book
about missiles, and rockets
corporate death cults
and
gross turn
ot technology

needing the insanity
of language
to V2 make
its point clear

Oh there we go
something launched
between the lines
dear Thomas
from the edge of this page

solitary single page yet
just one of some
plus seven hundred

the view
so awful
from up here on a great border
where one
might trace
the edge of the world

sink
deep into summit snow
get a handle
on its ending

MR PYNCHON

OPEN QUESTION

was over the rainbow
reading Gravity’s Rainbow

totally alone in the Manchester
Poly new lecture and dormitory complex
the night outside
straining against the streetlights
to impose impenetrability

occupancy
a month away, set for
summer and the new
academic year

and me
feeling secure, overlooking
the small matter of the SS20s
parked somewhere
in Eastern Europe
sights set on this city
and
thus on me

Oh V2 rocket
progenitor of these mid-range
city killers

this technology so set
on rendering all
human future an open
question

what Pandora could not have
imagined lurking
in the bottom
(true bottom
beneath all false versions)

but Pynchon
saw so intensely

setting his imagination
to dead end

TRAJECTORY

oh my shadow author
I read it all
your magnum opus
in one sitting

read until the gears.
in my brain ground together

needed to
for any hope of an ending
that though
frightfully, delightfully
savaged i might
feel complete
have worked out
the narrative trajectoty
of your death parabola

for this
to let every tick, spidsr
and tarantula of your telling
fill my braim with
the tough
silk of your web

not with quill and ink
or ballpoint or rattling
tommy gun of
typewriter

did you write this thing
commit to page, all
sluced and diced

but with the nose cone
of our decimation, needle
point of
such chain reaction

that those who ever read
brain-colonized, lived
that paranoid twisted
tormented
tantalizinv tale

once that seemed
adventure to warp
extemity
itself