Miniature Operas and Tiny Anarchies
An Angle: Curson / Wilshire
What remains — the scent of the crossing, shiny and dense, like corn syrup cut with aluminium. I know it as the angle of the road where the gutters are carriers for palm tree trash, when I go to the dentist for the cleaning of my teeth. All that needs doing is to slide north-south between sidewalks, the time it takes for the numbers to compress to a raw red hand and the scent catches there at a diagonal. It is not produced by the Tar Pits; it is of the road itself, it is something soft and not long living, like animals under the floorboards.
The Good Knight Inn
The instinct to infill — each diamond thin —
Then tapped indivisible to tax and tune.
The pool, too, under-illumined
Glitterbox jammed flat
With sand and gem-chocked aggregate.
The turret if tapped may choose one of two tunes
Rock-solid bounce-back grit into the knuckles
Or echo of e-vac spiral staircase
Extracted and re-spun to satellite mesh.
Yes — the emptiness — reaches into the rooms
But the dish delivers all that is needed.
The theme, thin-skinned, first seen from the road
And inside the nights are light, a sword born between us.
On probably not being watched while swimming
Not that spicy.
Just the prurience that lurks
In the suburbia
Of the American psyche.
Low cost lunar settlement
Is possible!
No idea how fast you can run
How high you can jump
Because there are more than 20 ways to become a lunar billionaire
And in this lunar settlement
You don’t need a space suit.
Sex in 1/6th gravity —
Don’t know what it’s like because it’s never been done!
Diving from 30ft into a cold blue pool
Takes 4 seconds on the Moon!
Yes, we can have fun and make lots of money living and working on the Moon
An expert said.
And from here — in the crater —
The Earth is 4x greater
And 50x brighter
Than the full Moon
The only issue
Is how to get there.
Auditorium
Sounds different, now
the water has drained from the ear
the way the echo feels the walls of the cave
and schools the brain.
Persephone’s Vertigo
Some time after entering the underworld, after the seeds had passed through her system and the wild rages against Hades had distilled to petty bickering, she started to experience symptoms of vertigo. Now there was no knowing which way was up.
She took to sleeping like a bat to redress the balance. To playing birdsong in the dark to restore a craving. To practicing the tightrope, as though to remember what it felt like to fall. But the separation would not hold. The sanity of division would not stick.
And all the while, the earth grew grey in turning.
Dice may decay: an instruction manual for how to watch magic shows
“Let no one enter here who is not a geometer”
-Inscribed above the entrance to Plato’s Academy (apparently)
“All things begin in order, so shall they end, and so shall they begin again”
-Thomas Browne, The Garden of Cyrus, or The Quincuncial Lozenge, or Network Plantations of the Ancients, naturally, artificially, mystically considered
It’s a trick known to golfers and gamblers. To confirm whether a ball or a die is evenly weighted, drop into a solution of salt water — dense enough for buoyancy — and watch as it spins on the surface. If one side recurs, you can trust the odds are skewed.
Why perform this test — why might evenness (even) matter. The goal is to gain mastery of an uncertain situation for the purpose of playing a game that is good. This game, that good — a way of playing which engages your skill in relation to chance, so that you might conjure a cosmos from chaos.
To achieve the ideal of evenness in the form of a golf ball is a performance for insurance. By regulating for randomness, you may rest assured that the motion of this sphere is the cleanest possible conversion of the arc of your swing, the fluid dynamics of the air currents, the thickness of the bristles trimmed to a green shade between mantis and shamrock. You will not be at the mercy of the ball, its willful weighting and sly orientation. In this way, you will stage a hero’s journey over the hills and into the pits, soaring, dipping, in search of new and better birds and saucy clubhouse anecdotes and safe in the knowledge of — no tricks.
In golf, the gauge of evenness is dependent on weather conditions and the topography of the gaming landscape – a broad, amoral, and uncontainable net of factors. In dice, the balancing act is compacted to the interior field of the game; their weighting comes pre-freighted with a moral compass. This is to say – the game that is good cannot be detached from pre-established criteria of fair or foul play, definitions specific to this slight and finite human scale.