Tag Archives: thomas pynchon

OPEN QUESTION

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


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