The Supreme Point
The rocket – young, empirical object –
steals sun from the Zamboolean plains.
It runs a blaze around a high-tensed torso.
A worshipper chalking ochre across
their baked young skin to let the spirits in
when the fire shock ceremony begins.
Silver steaming stack of gleaming, keening,
star-smallering steel. Pre-combustion puffs
emote in tight air. The rocket reflects
the sky, grand-potential and blue.
Hundreds nurse their own aspect. Schoolchildren
stash compacted Popular Mechanics
magazines in pockets … then excitedly
extract them again for the comparing
of a cover – inked in blasting jets
of orange yellow red – with the totem
standing passive aggressive in a deep sea
rhythm of whitely sparking field glasses.
Countdown. A hell of chemistry.
Hell of a noise … [indecipherable]
… this bird can fly! … Earth gravity clear …
Supreme Point coming into range … and view!
[Indecipherable] … can see something
… countdown … a hell of physics …
The rapture and sublimity of thin gravity dividing into polygones. Strings of lilac, dandy roses red.
The fancy and genius of slow spacecrew reaching beyond their forwards and phases. Raising hands to the big bang, this is it love, this is it.
The seraphic and infinity of we’re always in afternoon, we dare not stop. Of the monumoment mournfully tumbling as vast objects slow do all ways greatseem mournful.
The bliss and divinity of feeling the heat closing in, after some digestion neither of us feel.
The euphoria and gnosis of programming and metaprogramming in the human biocomputer when spring is here to tell you hurry.
🚀
The rocket – negotiated budget
manifestation – is assembled in
sections off-location, travels thoughtfully,
senator upright, to the charred launchpad
built sudden in the charmed glassy sands
which believed they were the unknown heavens
until structures set down girdered feet,
began talking of nothing but up.
Straight as light, silvery as a cascade
of coins. Comes on a motorised platform
through the poor country at barely any speed.
Skinwalkers, weird scenes, lost nieces, canyons
with howls running backwards to grey-hackled dogs.
Roads barred by a cavalcade of cops
who wear snapping black gloves. Who point.
Background newsreel crowds hold cardboard signs
of dislocated triumph. The rocket parades,
disassociated, looking away.
I am – seems [to?] be a large aircraft below 5,000
… I cannot affirm. It is four bright …
it seems to me like landing lights
… unknown due to the speed it’s travelling …
is there any airforce aircraft in the vicinity? …
Black Satellite signal indicates range
… out … out … five oh six oh … out
Supreme Point … possible …
are … you’re a little … breakdown
The rapture and sublimity of consciousness, blue, pale. I am my across streaks, being cremated. Of come true Alice painting roses red to be Davy Jones.
The fancy and genius of everywhere stars in the cabinlull. Burningexcited, turningexalted.
The seraphic and infinity of someday in the golden afternoon, merrily, merrily. It wasn’t always like this the pilot thinks.
The bliss and divinity of hypersition as on Earth so in heaven. Is that a Breton reference? Neither of us is clear. As is improbable so is imagined.
The euphoria and gnosis of spacecrew goddish and perception vast.
🚀
The rocket is obsessively monitored,
every instrumental output quicksent
for diagnostic opinion
to a climate-conditioned central control.
Puffs of pre-combustion snort rough
in cracking ancestor-arid desert air.
Commander Anastasia regards
her rows of engineers. In turn they
watch panels of registering signals.
Radar greenblips scanning the sky.
Needles gentle-dowsing like the antennae
of blind insects navigating crawlspace.
Telemetric displays occulting chaos,
Constrained rainbows of telling lights.
Constant dialogue between the square room
and fuel-shivering arrow five kay em
away. Commander Anastasia
flicks a switch, initiates a countdown.
… it seems to me that he’s playing
some sort of game. He’s flying …
over me two – three times at a time
… at speeds I could not identify …
Roger. What is your actual level?
My level is four and a half thousand,
four five zero zero … Nose
thrusters burn two seconds
… under thrusters burn one second
… under thrusters burn oh point five
seconds … nose thrusters burn
three seconds … locations [is?] …
tracking data indicates … Supreme
Point … mass data [down?]
The rapture and sublimity of the spacecrew are feedback of previous spacecrew.
The fancy and genius of seeing stars moving deeper like pi after the monumental decimal. Everything as numbers in tumbling evocation.
The seraphic and infinity of new tons of reality estate falling between astronauts. Of fear watched from a comfortable distance, eating into the frozen normalfully.
The bliss and divinity of fantasia inslide the pilote’s head – an interiority of sacré.
The euphoria and gnosis of the pirate’s life. With a heigh and ho, we’re going to waste the drop.
🚀
The rocket is not the product of
biology – the subject not the stuff –
but the progeny of maths, chemistry,
parallel-to-mystical particle
physics. Stacking of midnight-Benzedrine
jazzed-calculations on Pasadena
blackboards that engineers run the high-jinx length of.
Wracking of moonlight brains half-melted by dream.
Burnt Caltech laboratory benches,
lunacy landscapes of lists, scraps,
sketches, thin-skinned plans, fuels for stratosphere,
projectile summits, gyroscopes and gas.
Water-cooled nozzles, solid-state patents,
mad young men and their stabilising vanes.
Jack Parsons died for our sums. Everett
timelines hacking blueprint paper. Spacelines
graphing inevitable combustion,
and slick homogeny of bustling thrust.
… National Guard 869 from Godman Tower …
we have an object out south of Godman here
that we are unable to identify … Roger,
I have the gas … the object is directly ahead
… moving at about half my speed ...
it appears to be a metallic object …
I’m still climbing ... I’m trying to close in
for a better look … my God, I see people …
Supreme Point marked on [the?] charts …
don’t have visual …
The rapture and sublimity of the farfadets when all’s sad and done, when all’s saints and him. Scents of black hole mucus, gravity waves frying in the sands our ships sailed to.
The fancy and genius of many a tear we shed little star, where is the crescent? Mainframe wildlore, thickets of subroutines and unused commands flustering in circuitry shadowork.
The seraphic and infinity of whales breaking ice. Broken ships sinking singing into dark brine wrap.
The bliss and divinity of morning glories twinkle twinkle. Tomorrowland will be the greatest TV special ever built. Just you watch.
The euphoria and gnosis of becoming more clear after some digestion the spacecrew are feedback. Moon awake, there’s a smile in your heart.
🚀
I miss my home I miss my
wife I miss my home I miss
my wife I miss my home I
miss my wife I misss home
my wife IsIsIs my miss
home give me your answer do
I do miss my wife I miss
my home I miss my wife.
Time dilates and space awaits
with maternity ward calm –
a new universe
coming through!
Bloated though –
reality tunnels occasionally
fail to drain
and then you’re filled with poison
right from the quark.
‘If we had the technology
we’d wire this sanatorium like a battery,
siphon off their raving as energy,
stable and inexhaustible’,
says the military doctor, Colonel Digby.
Opens double doors, easy as a resident,
to a long low room of incident.
Tentacles prowling independent
through exegesis of bedsheets
from bodies transcendent.
Digby stops and makes a gesture,
half-carnival, half-surgeonlecturer,
at three patients in a corner.
‘The orderlies call these
the Universal Monsters’.
‘The Wolfman’, all-fours humanoid,
wholly furred, haunch-poised –
bristles with a forest’s void
and the danger of the anima –
but Digby continues with sangfroid.
(You can taste his ringmaster’s relish),
‘each hair is seemingly possessed
of an individual consciousness,
watch them waving as if craving
some higher damned purpose’.
‘And we’re not sure if the man is forgot
or now divided into aliquots
and each hair a little despot-
mind adding constant mental grind.
Anyway, he howls a lot.’
‘Now the Mummy’ – held tightly in bandages –
‘slow-motion self-repels. Lavishes
the place with wormish nerves, finger phalanges,
a zero g misrule of blood globules,
a lonely ballet of distancing appendages.’
‘Disgusting to watch – ‘the weak pukeular force’
the boys call it in their farce
of collecting limbs, sponging sauce,
stuffing him back into his restraining wraps,
… he’s quite insane of course.’
‘Finally, The Count. Though he oughta,
he takes no food or water
just his own blood, kinda insular,
the ultimate self-infatuate,
self-perpetuated economy circular.’
The Count looks up, terrified.
His mouth searching undignified
for veins in an arm scarred and pied.
‘Poor devil. Like the others, impossible to kill,
fuck knows, we’ve tried.’
🚀
The rocket, erected, photographs well.
Anything with fins does – sharks and the car
James Dean wrecked his neck in. Against sky
blue enough to derange horses grimacing
with thirst, photographers arrange an
intimacy of stark blank and shining edge.
They shoal around the launchpad, looking
for the perfect periodical sale
of a remarkable future visioned
then materialised in reflection,
steel and aerodynamic everything
that is as much echo of pulp sci-fi
paperback wrapper art strange-ing rockets
colonising moons, bursting through eyeballs
of deep black void cheap trash books churned out
by hacks, than necessary flight design.
‘The Outward Urge’, ‘Exiles on Asperus’,
‘Derelict of Space’ and ‘The Supreme Point’.
It’s not an aircraft … it is
[open microphone for two seconds] …
Delta Sierra Juliet … as it’s flying past
it’s a long shape
[open microphone for three seconds]
[cannot?] identify more than that.
It has such speed
[open microphone for three seconds] …
last known Supreme Point [unintelligible]
The rapture and sublimity of saccharineethereal choirs in the animated films they used to show.
The fancy and genius of neither feel certain of what actually happens in the poem after our first read. And now we’re so many years away.
The seraphic and infinity of knowing weather the big chafe mook can see your plea-ing.
The bliss and divinity of blowing minds together as the Hypnagogic Drive fires up. A council of evolved kelp darken into existence as if on a photographic plate.
The euphoria and gnosis of lizardbrain cycles dropping clusterbomb hard beyonderneath every flightsnuff spacecrew crewcut. Do I hear twenty-one?
🚀
The rocket – locked hatches and pressure-sealed
inlets – waits like a jar of mummified ibis
in an Egyptian dignitary’s tomb.
Waits like a desperate-swallowed Quaalude,
a bullet caught in a magician’s mouth.
Waits like a foxglove nodding itself numb.
It waits nib-like as if ink-rich ready
to transcribe a gospel or madrigal
or dumb medieval proclamation.
Like an artificial limb for the shocked
amputee.
The rocket is a taut metal wound healed
over and waiting for radiant health.
Waits like a chrysalid, a bubo,
a chestnut gall full of pulsing wasp.
Waits like a bottle, cast from a bloom
of fearful, twisting rigging into the sea.
SECURITY COMMUNICATION ...
Can you read that on the scale?
… Yes, sir. We’re now on the five-tenths scale,
and we’re reading about third, fourth make
over … OK, we’re still comfortably safe here.
GARBLED SECURITY COMMUNICATION …
Security Six ... have a light-all with gas … please
… scale reading SP …
The rapture and sublimity of First Officer Weir. A Boltzmann Brain who has southernly popped into resistance. Usual initial question – who am I questioning?
The fancy and genius of people cannot see over our way, we’re only sure. Sundawn writes the canyon with blank-faced government agency triumph.
The seraphic and infinity of taking a stress pill, thinking things over.
The bliss and divinity of no better time to start when the second star on the right is painting the spacecrew roses. Richard Dadd hears you thinking and looks up from his Bedlam easel in surprise.
The euphoria and gnosis of honeycomb halls populated with celestial jesters who push back, giggling ‘it’s not your time yet!’
🚀
The rocket – we’re told – has had final checks
and Zamboolean ground crew have departed
just a moment ago to recap weather reports
wind comfortably within safety parameters
all signs indicate we’re on schedule
on this historic day I can tell you
this launch is being syndicate broadcast
in 137 countries watching right now
on this momentous day if our camera
looks beyond Highway Five used to
transport the rocket it’ll see a glint
of windscreens lined up on the perimeter
that’s thousands of sight-seekers
travelling hundreds of kilometres
to be here on this remarkable day
and we’re told the spacecrew
have made the customary last hour naming
of their capsule calling it Kusta ben Luka.
The meter’s definitely giving a little pulse.
You’re reading the clicks, I can’t hear the clicks.
That about the centre, Bruce? …
OK, let’s go to the centre.
… That’s the best deflection of the needle
… We’re on the point five scale.
At approximately 01.25 hours …
We’re getting right at a half of a millirem
at the Supreme Point.
The rapture and sublimity of carrying our familiars with us. Millions of miles away from home too.
The fancy and genius of monks half-handedly plea-ing in mounting violet mist.
The seraphic and infinity of every emergent colour the Supreme Fascist thought to formula.
The bliss and divinity of then that streaks across. Am I my pale, blue consciousness asks the astronaut.
The euphoria and gnosis of Zener cards – seawave lines, DNA circles, perspectival triangles, hashish courtyard squares. Of spooling action at a blissdance.
🚀
The rocket is phallic, no question about it,
one thick, control-centre-cocked, priapic
steely gun waiting to be shot, to slide
between the plump sky and into the vast
irradiated yoni of interstellar space.
Don’t need no psychologist’s read
on the call of the penis to believe
the entrepreneurs’ and governments’ creed
of propagating the human seed, their
starish multiplication of the species,
comes from iridescent adolescent
dreams of seeing their jissom cross the face
of reality. Which leads to the query –
would a matriarchy have created
the rocket? Or something more vaginal,
perhaps a portal, a permanent tunnel?
Two-way journey to total mystery? Hell,
maybe the Sapphics wouldn’t want to leave.
[indistinct] ... B________
and two other personnel requesting …
Tell them negative …
Have them cut it off
… is between indentation two and three
about five feet away …
Put it in here. I’ve got some more …
[crystalline?] Supreme Point.
The rapture and sublimity of lions a-rovin’ over the sea. She’d raise her voice to the hillside. Of dead spacecrew gulping enormous for coherence.
The fancy and genius of dreaming that you dream, shining in the night (for the golden afternoon), if the bones there get up.
The seraphic and infinity of that ash too, in thought. Turning monologue the ship’s Captain becomes running brains.
The bliss and divinity of fracturing astronaut jacked in to and off by an extensive redacted cryptozoology database.
The euphoria and gnosis of sharing the cabin with human individual metamorphosis total overcomers anonymous chugging Kesey’s soft drinks. A pirate’s life is a lot of things from the flowers.
🚀
The rocket’s interior – commissioned
from a leading Scandinavian
architectural practice – is designed
to blend superior spacecrew comfort
with optimum intuitive utility.
Literally a machine for living in.
A psychologically sensitive
palette of black and white and accents of
hot silver and deep-marine digital
spatial illumination. Art Deco
pellet portholes in conversation with
minimalist spectral details across
key mission productivity stations.
Flight furniture subtly upholstered
in self-repair mycelium fibre
woven in serene patterns envisioned
by an AI artist represented
in major museums and blue-chip collections.
They’d like to use the omni. I’ll leave it in Slew
I’ve got good signal strength in Slew …
OK yaw-AGS and PGNS agree
… very closely around, [use] angles
our position checks down range
show us to be a little long …
getting a little fluctuation
in the AC voltage now
Delta-H is minus 2,900
are go at four … give us a read … same alarm
… you can feel it in here when it throttles down
… better than the simulator.
16/68 up.ing and pitch -9,
yaw +18.f descent looks good …
Supreme Point coming up.
The rapture and sublimity of the dreams you plan that tiger lilies love, the dandy roses red know happy forever.
The fancy and genius of a mind, grey-faced and subsisting on scraps of unjointed image. Dust and guitars.
The seraphic and infinity of sanity as a habit. A voice not quite not there, uncoloured, happy as ghosts.
The bliss and divinity of my aware of of aware becoming my brain’s running monologue.
The euphoria and gnosis of suggestions from the eggheads back on Earth, something to focus on. We’ve got to be there if she saw white instead of the golden wonderland thing.
🚀
Telescopes are hungry. Sometimes I would awake
in the warm mid west middle of the fieldblack night.
I’d lie in my basic wooden bed with a tingling tangible
of the gape of land and untouched, constellation-clustered sky
that secret-surrounded, without menace or kindness,
our farmalone house. In the small light from a barely moon
my telescope was shadowshape by the basic wooden window.
Voracious for astronomy, it had woken me and I always obeyed.
Then a little older, in the smallville tendril basement-tape years
of nothing and nothing and nothing and nothing,
of teenage loneliness so acute the massing fields
would whisper of it in pale, perfect circles just before dawn,
then I began to have memories of famous times to come.
Project Bluebird I’d call the creepy crawly thoughts.
I am a junior researcher attached to a prestigious university –
well-endowed redbrick buildings, coffee and bagel student affairs,
ostinato hazing dares in the campus lake, bitter vicious porters,
faculty dinners with drunk visiting poets, the occasional suicide
from the bridge. Advert mornings would arrive everyday fresh, like
this is it love country music, or just-flipped exam papers.
In the labs an anomaly on the radio telescope data.
A bit of scruff on the chart-recorder. Thought it was pigeon shit
at first, climbed into the horn antenna and scrubbed –
remembered scraping windows of stables back home.
Still a fuzzy interference. A patch of nonlocality at 4080 megacycles.
Distorted voices position coming up in 12 … ok, keep trying ZM …
Godman … Have them cut it off … I CAN SEE A FLAME! …
WHAT? … countdown … a hell of physics … can see something
… Black Satellite signal indicates I have the gas …
the object is directly ahead … Have them cut it off …
is between indentation two and three … moving at about half my speed ...
‘Wonderful wonderful’ said Prof Hofmann, like the Motown song.
So round the department my discovery got known as that Supreme point.
Funny how these things stick. Excess antenna temperature.
It sounded like our pilots. As if from the war. Signals bouncing back.
In the summer of pleiades, penumbra and the occasional
unexplained whizzing over the gabled gothic red barn roof,
I remember the future, imagine myself in a Fantastic Tale.
‘The Haunted Zone’ ‘Where Time Breaks Down’
‘Voices From The Stars’ ‘The Strangest Coordinates’
‘Beyond Our Understanding’ ‘The Scientist Who
Discovered New Space’.
🚀
The rocket in the eyes of the stopped girl
is so slow and so unimaginable.
Like the city had come to them for once,
down the big dirt route skirting the rumbled town.
Maybe it was a sliding grain silo
of a strange foreign farmer she should fear.
Maybe a nightmare fish, gill-preaching air
from centipedal throne of sixteen wheels.
In the dust eyes of the distant girl
the rocket is a blind faith invasion.
She’ll talk her life away, in an amazed
ever, about what she saw when small.
Tell her roadside children about the day.
Tell their roadside children about the day.
The only day she ever had unlike
the others. When the rocket stopped her.
Made its sovereign journey past her edge,
the herding of a solitary god.
Captain we’ve lost contact with ZM control
… on this trajectory Supreme Point
position coming up in 12 … ok, keep trying ZM
… hold course … plot 0.9 gyre on DEJA …
Captain ZM contact re-established …
have relayed current position …
Supreme Point in 5 ….
The rapture and sublimity of mist in the rigging and ropes are woven ropes all the way down.
The fancy and genius of vying heavy for place in the glorious midnight mass of colourless space.
The seraphic and infinity of far-fa-day when all’s sails and ships. This is the psychonauts’ smooth world.
The bliss and divinity of we’re the path that moonbeams make to nowhere at all.
The euphoria and gnosis of my prince coming happiest just behind anywhere. Was he big and wonderful in life?
🚀
The rocket is (until the rage alchemy
of outward engine projection
rends the gathered psyche with its
broiled mechanical determinacy)
simply a static tower. Narrow symbol
found on fringes of mythopoeic tales.
Allegorically embodying
the hermitic aspect of knowledge.
The rocket looms like a tower like a
tall frozen tear in the drear gothic
silhouettescape of a sallow land.
The rocket stills like a city tower
like a glass syringe held sad and ready.
The rocket is the tarot tower,
intact, no fallers from destruction, yet,
and is also Yeats’ Thoor Ballylee.
The waterwheel gyres in sucking fates.
Through winebreath we receive the visions.
five … four … three … two … one … one
two … three … four … five …
come in … come in … come in …
LISTEN … LISTEN! … COME IN!
COME IN … COME IN … TALK TO ME!
TALK TO ME! … I AM HOT! … I AM HOT!
WHAT? … FORTYFIVE? … WHAT? …
FORTYFIVE? … FIFTY? …
YES … YES … YES … BREATHING …
BREATHING … OXYGEN …
OXYGEN … I AM HOT … [THIS?]
ISN’T THIS DANGEROUS? … IT’S ALL …
ISN’T THIS DANGEROUS? … IT’S ALL …
YES … YES … YES … HOW IS THIS?
WHAT? … TALK TO ME! … HOW SHOULD I
TRANSMIT? YES … YES … YES …
WHAT? OUR TRANSMISSION BEGINS NOW …
FORTYONE … THIS WAY … OUR
TRANSMISSION BEGINS NOW …
FORTYONE … THIS WAY … OUR
TRANSMISSION BEGINS NOW …
FORTYONE … YES … I FEEL HOT …
I FEEL HOT … IT’S ALL … IT’S HOT …
I FEEL HOT … I FEEL HOT … I FEEL HOT …
I CAN SEE A FLAME! … WHAT? …
I CAN SEE A FLAME! … I CAN SEE A
FLAME! … I FEEL HOT … I FEEL HOT …
TWENTYONE … TWENTYONE … TWENTYONE
The rapture and sublimity of Captain ships the thought turning to ash. In cremated being.
The fancy and genius of it’s the same as having nobody like him.
The seraphic and infinity of derivative narratives open invisible. Neither of us are after some digestion. You can feel the heat closing in, you really can.
The bliss and divinity of all plea-ings being a purse and a natter.
The euphoria and gnosis of an astronaut reminiscing he was so romantic. Got to be there jolly sea rover.
🚀
The rocket – fixed in the magnetic eyes
of desert birds – doesn’t dervish. It landmarks
stretched plains defined by horns of low mountains
feverishly distant. A still new rock,
undancing and heavy in the illness
of lifelessness. The birds are frenetic
between the moon and slither. They use
this recent certain presence to locate
and navigate their sacred flightlines
from eggborn on sheers to hunting grounds
of frantic tensing rodents, liverish gods.
And the rocket is an imposter but sun –
in shame and betrayal of settled land –
plays tricks across this synthetic upcrop,
as if machine and ancient can dream-
song in goetic reconstruction.
The birds wheel in days of mechanised dust,
sensing strange glints in their map of here.
Countdown. A hell of chemistry.
Hell of a noise … [indecipherable]
… this bird can fly! … Earth gravity clear …
Supreme Point coming into range … and view!
[Indecipherable] … can see something
… countdown … a hell of physics …
The rapture and sublimity of dizzy daffodils on wings they never bury.
The fancy and genius of nausea tumbling over, no end to the hypnagogia.
The seraphic and infinity of The Stone slinking sexually into dark brine wrap. Of adventurers floating like dead dreams discarded at the suisunnycide morning.
The bliss and divinity of standing at the window of the anchorite cell of the astronaut’s mind.
The euphoria and gnosis of after some digestion the spacecrew are so beautiful, it escalates.
🚀
Afterward
Since publishing The Supreme Point it’s impossible to countdown the number of times realders have asked if I’m surprised choir how much written has subsequently happened. My answer is all ways the same – if you knew anything about what was occulting at Warwick University in the mid-1990s, you wouldn’t wonder. I should add though that any simultaneous with actual people, heaving or dread, is entirely cointelpro. I was in another poet’s dream. Working in an oval spaceship basement and I was studying the Shri Yantra. The bindu in the centre was The Supreme Point. This is as true as any of the other theories I’ve heard.