Peter Milne Greiner: In the Alien’s Abdomen
WEATHER PEOPLE
In Joshua Tree and Marfa and in Whitefish, Montana
I want so desperately to remain a little naïve,
to call a comet by its Latin name, to misconstrue all
my observations
At the bottom of the Stanley Cup everyone is everyone
At The Topiary of Terror—an American bar in Reykjavik—
my love pentagram consists of assorted conceits and the Virgos
resist the last sips of beer
I type them all A and they laugh and laugh and laugh and clone
extinct reasons to proceed with abandon
and I inhabit that abandon like mitochondria,
the alien storyless given that keeps on giving
One by one, I escape the places I have become over the course of a trillion seconds
After the datarush, its core-sampled sites far from resemble
any proto-Eden I’ve ever read a paragraph about on the internet
In the secret labs in the secret hamlets the facts are fudged clean
and lustrous
I await them with undressed wounds
FOLDERS
I open the folder called Featured Exotic
Obstacles & Their Peril
and find my friends
Fissures, Rivers of Lava,
Whitewater, IEDs in Postwar
Meadowgrass
I open the folder called Balance Beam
but it hasn’t been invented yet
except in Star Trek
so I do my favorite thing and wait
for it and then I point the beam at my eye
because I’m a jackass and I cross
the beam into my brain
I open the folder called Simple Invented Things
and find Fire, Penicillin, Paroxysms
of Indifference I Fly Into When Suddenly
Whole Seasons I’ve Tried To Discard
Show Up Again In Ugly Words
Like Duende
—What a trash word, that—
And the beam lights up all my neurons
like comets with spacecraft crashed into them
And fresh souls pass through puberty
and make music that makes me
feel like Leonard Cohen
And a trillion parties are thrown and I go
to every single one and ghost
And I am a mysterious exclave
There are traces of radiation in my soft tissue
I respond to attempts at communication intermittently
and the swords and the sorcery and the process
and the progress are my life
I perpetuate the legacies of marble
sculpture and paradoxical thought
I am ecosystem, empire, archive, the concourses,
the fountains, the annexes, and there is no looking
back, there is nothing to look back at,
and I open the folder called Nothing
To Look Back At and the hydrocodone glistens in my blood
like shoals of piranhas
FRINGE
Dear Diary, the new spell is too wordy
despite a certain acumen that shines
through like definite threat,
expansive, gripping threat
but this threat is not for me
wish though I may myself luck in
casting it elsewhere
What orbit-decaying metamorphoses
will search my soul over, find
its Groom Lake and infiltrate, Diary
When will the pretty lime crumble
in my hands like a ‘zoic Period, title
a textbook chapter and subduct into oblivion
O user manual of treacherous subheadings
I read from you in ancient English
inside a circle of crushed uranium
and wait for my gods to talk to me
through the radar, through wrath,
top secret clearance, dark arts,
helicopter blade, retina scan, green candle, axolotl,
poison dagger in the alien’s abdomen,
through all pure, all-consuming languages of possession
Love, Peter
CATASTROFEED
What the future
monitors my wants for is self-serving
activism
What the fuel
left to its own devices
sleeps in is darkness
intact
What the fungi
advances is delay
better loved
What the fullfillers
deprive us all of is after
after after what the comes
after the whatafter
after the afterwhat the Funnel of Love
whose swan-shaped gondola idles
and tranquilizes the harmless the
innocent Earth gravity the loyal crust
the devoted mantle harms the martyred core
After what I wait for is what I fuck for
the etceterine and the abbreviative what
waits for me always and you are
its guardian
its zinc arrow
its authenticated credential
its ventriloquism
Peter Milne Greiner's work has been featured in Motherboard, Dark Mountain, Fence, SciArt Magazine, and elsewhere, and has been lauded by the likes of Jeff VanderMeer and Claire L. Evans. He studied poetry at The New School under Sekou Sundiata, and is a scholar of the history of the Roaring Forties. In July of 2013 he sent a poem into space through the Jamesburg Earth Station in Carmel Valley, California. He is the author of the chapbook Executive Producer Chris Carter. LOST CITY HYDROTHERMAL Field is his first full length collection.
