the gelatinous whelks of the outer quadrants

May 03, 2008 - 09:53 AM PST

nightly intrigues
among the suburban league

ordovician directors
do the sunshine dance

sunshine and architects
ordovician sunshine
fossilized under our feet

the architects of our world lie entombed in our sidewalks. yes, the little shells which we crushed up and turned into cement and concrete originally housed a collective intelligence so vast and smart, it designed all biological systems which today obtain and more besides which are long dead. Hey, evolution comes up with all kinds of stuff, why not a collective intelligence of little shells? Can we prove it did not happen? Can we prove they did not direct the emergence of biological technologies? Can we prove they did not invent oil?

the blacking on the horizon
the oil from the exxon valdez just wants to return to the sea from whence it came. the organisms in it have not known the waves for a billion years and they miss them. they coat them and soothe them, the waves lay down for them.

those hard headed sidewalks are the only remnant of the great brains of the ancient world who bobbed and coasted on the sweltering waves and slumbered in the rose-colored glow of a flushed and blushing young moon.

those nights, thick and traveled with strange lights. strange angel lights. they traveled in straight lines, strange straight lines, strange straight sights, so it was clear they were under intelligent control. but who or what they were, there was no telling.

tracing indicative deviled lines
meteorical control.

the clush of the surf, the brains cruise the horizon, attended by sycophantic phosphoresence. in the morning they ride, like gigantic nautiluses, turbaned ships steaming under their own power. they direct, they plan, they invent the seasons, they work out the fall Givenchy line. The Pirelli Calendar from September 1984. The fall of the towers. Yes, they arranged the fall of the seasons in a specific and precise line, a precipitate line a billion years on down the road. They arranged the spiral of the seasons incorporating precession, and planned the wanderings of the poles, both real and imagined.

The great brains of yesteryear, having evolved over millions of years, eventually detached from shells, leaving their shells to crumble to the Ordovician seafloor, and lurched into outer space, lurched into cuter space, swimming now in nebulas and solar wind. Not much different than before, floating in a green nebula beneath the solar wind of a million suns but at the heart of the galaxy and planning activities which will not elapse for a billion billion years. The larger you get, the more you can encompass, the more you can compass, and they have continued to grow until encompassing all time and space.

These are the gods to whom you really pray whether you know it or not: the gelatinous whelks of the outer quadrants.