'Killer App' by Brian Clements

    
    

Mid-flight, the plane lurched and for a second I forgot where I was going. But this isn’t about that. Whatever happens, it’s not enough to call it an end. This while neurons flash and eyes roll back.

Or I am watching a movie about whatever happens when the Holy Grail becomes starlight, or equivalent to a circle, as eternal as breakfast, and gives us an answer to the problem of relationships.

In other words, I’m not done yet, which is a common experience, like visions of Necropolis at the funeral. I have an endless supply of patience.

Whatever it is, it happens among people buried in schedules. If you make an appointment, you can trail your girlfriend until she tongues your suspicion. You can shoot through the walls. But you can’t live in the new until you move there.

Once it reaches critical mass, information wants to be free, prints itself onto trees. Not even the flux of leaf-turn and commerce speaks louder than that bristled quiet. The loud coyotes flash and disappear against sagebrush on the sidewalk.

Not even language’s back and forth nor its echoes, nor the mind’s sly do-overs prepare anyone. Everyone wants to start fresh--the heart jolts, its reflection bearing down, the clock a manifesto.

Not even a superhero flying into the wide expanse of his corpse, branded by power lines and logoed with string theories of natural love can head home after all that work.

Perhaps the most important performance lies in the universe of dirt, sycamores dug-in, the firmament fox-holed in spite of itself. And how long will that take?

A good rule of thumb is two days for your grandmother’s funeral, a day for a cold, half a day for the doctor, and an hour and a half for your sanity. Cold is another word for absence of feeling.

Whatever it is, it all works out to faster, cheaper, smaller. Which is all to say that death is a data catalyst. Not unlike Xmas--all new!

Whatever it is, it happens every time you wake up. You need an endless supply of language to talk about it, and you have to keep talking about it or it gets away. It is equivalent to, perhaps, a medieval era of longing, but faster.

(from his book Jargon, Quale Press, 2010)