The Crisis of Infinite Worlds

Krystle
Krystle Cole
you're all I thought about sometimes
I watched you while our daughter slept
your Sissy Spacek ways
your laconic demeanor in relaying
either ecstasy or trauma
& the un-embittered empathy your voice conveyed
on YouTube
which is our loving cup
the solution of butter
& DMT you took
anally that really made you
freak the fuck out
& your friends just stood there
watching you
as you hurtled alone through mirrored tunnels.
It's that frictionless feeling
the smooth & vacant course
that lacks abruption, one wave
the clinical mania un-
differentiated whiteness
contains when cylindrical cloud
hard & plastic comes to represent
the mind to the mind
& thus describe a model
of terrible momentum
with unity of purpose
toward nothing so much
as cold, radiant nature
stripped of Eros, of becoming,
just the mainframe
& its withering severity
without any predicate
of others, save perhaps their
gazes, no walls,
no nothing, completely
white light & your name
when your consciousness was
splitting time was stopping
you were going always into that.
I was going always to the mall
in those months,
the young century's rainiest
April & May, to walk the
baby & to understand my art.
I didn't understand.
I would move the stroller
through the halogen, over
grooved tile & across those
smooth marble expanses meant
to simulate floating & gliding
before that pure frictionless
feeling was entire. Sometimes
we'd go inside the stores.
Sears was still enormous
& because of its design
implied a bound series of
discrete, related worlds
linked by passages threatened
& precarious to me.
The connections felt
besieged or like a mask
for separation, they felt
like connection between us
in life but I didn't
take my allegory
further Krystle Cole, into your
lysergic delirium later redeemed
by a beautiful discipline
of spirit & cosmography
developed for praxis. I liked
your video on candy
flipping hard & developing
ESP with friends.
It suggested oneness
was a leavened mix
of random indiscretion,
bruising wariness, & bliss
obtained by synchronizing
chemical encounter. Krystle,
there's a made up drug
I wonder if you'd do it?
Bradley Cooper, in Limitless
takes this little pill, which,
in its candy dot translucence
looks a lot like a tear plucked
from the cheek in Man Ray's "Larmes."
With it, he can utilize
all of his brain, & so
he un-riddles the patterning
hidden in the ceaseless
flow of capital, structuring its
chaos in excess of any mortal
with a terrible momentum
& unity of purpose toward
nothing so much as pure profit
& complete subordination
of the world. At the mall
certain spots sold old stuff: sports
memorabilia & video
games, vintage organs & deluxe
baby grands. In one store
there were highly priced
comics with toys & ephemera
related to the stories.
They had action figures
based on some series I guess
called The Crisis of
Infinite Earths. I wrote
the phrase down in my notebook
& realized only later that I'd
made a rather telling trans-
position, putting the word
'world' where 'earth' was & thinking
The Crisis of Infinite Worlds
I guess because anyone will
occasion the world as a
world its commonality precarious
but real, & the person
beside them does the same the person
far in every way from them will as well
where the wound of even
being in material conditions
where consciousness is made these
confrontations & arrangements
each taking their referent
then as earth or taking
something else entirely
as world—the word is profligate
& dense & transparent & cheap
& impossibly one the clearest pill.
In our minds it floods with light & we
see through that, life's benevolent corruption
in a radiance we can't make
any sense of. Krystle, have you ever,
just standing around,
noticed someone smoking
in an older silver Volvo
& watched the comeback feelings
of a Tupac Easter Sunday
steep in their ambivalent features
until they are more radiant
than cinematic virgins
having lost it in the wake
of Saint Maria Goretti
whose patronage is lost
to the brutalized sweetness
of her charges
when depicted in the mind
& reconstructed
as a low-res simulation
by scientists the weekend
Wall Street's occupied & particles
are found to go
faster than light
then weirdly feel like
this is paradise
not for people
but paradise
regardless.
That same May
I had gone to Detroit. I saw
the most wonderful graffiti, more
a prayer, written on a wall
in magic marker, it read—
Two Things:
    1) That we would grow closer & closer as time progresses.
    2) That our ships would not crash.
Magic marker on a
surface doesn't have
much depth of skin.
You move it smoothly
on the wall & it stays smooth
barely records the softest friction
of two separate textures meeting.
The wetness of its onyx
dries quick or even quicker
if you blow on it with circled lips,
like clouds in old maps
that blew ships across a flat earth
to an edge I don't exactly
not idealize. That somewhere
there's a precipice in this world & tracing
my finger along those ardent lines
I'd found the fault of it
a little, in its boldness far too faint
& not enough.