Life Systems

published in Blotterature Ekphrastic Issue

I was hungry like a battery for his love. He charged me up, like an unbroken orange and teal
horse, painted without restraint by a touched brush-master. I had that painting back home,
hanging on the hearth.

We had plugged in this morning. And again for tea-time, instead of scones and oolong, looking
out at The Blue Marble. The wormhole of time had brought us to 3 p.m. “This is becoming a
self-contained unit,” he thrust into our silent conversation, our bodies’ electricity.

We were running out of calories, oxygen, all the human keys of sustenance.

We saw the apogee of an asteroid like the flow of information from god. Time became
paradoxical, my finger pad touching itself. I was downloading nuance, drinking in the Nommo.

Below us, the 90-year-old yogi kicked into a headstand lotus. The lotus-eaters on earth turned on
their televisions. The radio waves of Ground Control’s last doomed words had subsided to only
gentle swells, and the last of the land’s wild mustangs shook their manes and ran.

During training, when I thought of my man-mate, I always thought of his chest. The warmth of
it, to begin with. And what was inside, I thought of that too. Hints of gravitas.

In space, we save precious matter in a box in his man-chest. To access, I lace golden chest hair
through my fingers, trace three scars with my time-sensitive pads, key in my print codes on the
Golden Triangle of his moles. Then we place gently harvested stray hairs, balling them up into
coils. Nail clippings, dried nose snots, and all other flesh detritus follow into the primordial
slime. I bury them in the strongbox, piling up the flesh of earth like I were burying a sweet little
seed.

My man-mate and I have evolved. His heart pumps forth green after green, sprouts of my
freshness from his treasury. We are a living system, self-contained, producing produce in the
dead space of the spaceship, overriding failed mechanical functions with our love battery, god-
flow, and carnal matter. We plug in and the cycle pulses.

We are like the wild horse. We need no one.