"The poet is of no party." Baudelaire
“… details are made available by mapping the data to colors that humans can perceive.”—NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory News
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(zinnias in space, ISS)
It’s a fable, really, it’s a cartoon of itself. It’s a lesson in starvation really.
It’s a fable where I see myself a child planting zinnias but I am planting the idea of childhood.
It’s a fable for the soon-removal, the ruin of the rooted where seeing anything is like seeing a flower without a world, the zinnias’ perfect gears of orange petals controlled enough to live almost anywhere, removed enough to appear in geometric form. It’s a fable where the orbit betrays girlhood zinnia plots and no one ever pokes a finger one inch in the planet to press the seed fleck into the soft. I read a fable a fairy tale a seed packet label called abandonment called post-earth ideation or airless station or round-tipped zinnia petals fixed in pixels. Autonomous gardening spilled into neural petals’ algorithm-seeing. They spoil themselves with lack of soil. They zero out omission. They are not unlike cell-phone screens or golf greens or gated community crests, orange in green and green in orange and orange in green and people forage in their removal… someone eats up their own cloud-cover and calls it survival.
It’s a satellite-slick night. This platoon of petals calls itself living being
resuscitation bright.
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(keyhole inside the debris resulting from the birth of a new star, Orionis)
The thought of seeing became debris. The cactus flower, the picture frame. The [is seen] a keyhole inside the unseen debris, a wisp of a keyhole really, every hint of sight a wisp against the quicker vanishment. The fire rims were growing, the ragged maps debris-forming, the color-coded evacuation status, the future/past craggy trail the floral comforters to-do lists anything potentially seen potentially cast into flammable reams. The unseen debris included the receptacle for Scotch tape empty of tape… you put your thumb in it and rummage the spin. Inside the fire, the burnt flower, vanished flower, locked in the mind.
The eyes look backward for a way. The debris inside the keyhole included colliding debris of disappearance and appearance simultaneously. I want to tape the ash together until the tape has no glue and spin in keyhole trace with you+you+you+
The place you wandered among the cactus needles and the bulbous purple cactus grapes that vanished in a day.
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Note: Some diction in this series originated in image descriptions on NASA’s various Instagram accounts.
zinnias: https://www.instagram.com/nasa/p/CtZxuGjSorR/
keyhole: https://www.instagram.com/p/C59J7n6S5LX/