Brand New Work!

To everyone who stuck with me this past year... thank you, thank you, thank you!  And to everyone who is just joining me-- welcome!  You'll see a couple of poems below.  That was me dipping my toes into the watery wilderness of blogging.  It's time to hold my breath, and plunge.

This once-poetry blog is the new site for my long-form creative work.  We're going to jump right in with the first chapter of my novel, "Starship Someone."  It's one of those New Space Opera joints the kids are all talking about these days.  Please, read at your leisure!  I'm gonna post chapters every month to start.  I really hope to start posting new chapters biweekly, or even weekly!  But that all depends on you.

If you like what you read, you can just mosey on over to my Patreon page (upper left hand corner link, "Become a Patron!".  Every dollar lets me do more of the thing I love-- write stories for you to read.

And so, without further ado...

Starship Someone

by Tim Zeddies

 

Chapter One

Margelle lay encrusted in the nerves and muscles—she was warm and held firmly by pink and red tendons, safe and enfolded in layer and layer of impenetrable muscle.  Only a few thousand feet separated her from empty space, from death and the emptiness that spat ships out and swallowed them up into.  She was whole here, knowing her place in the worlds, moving from one to the next.  She loved the feeling of moving, of never being anyplace, of knowing herself as a cell in this larger love of hers, this creature wrapping the space-time around her to grasp the underside of this star-blanket and bring it up under her chin.

            She was so joined with the creature around her that they were of one mind and one purpose.  There was no Margelle, and no Zuzu; both knew where they wanted to go and how to get there.  Margelle did not need to run over the thousands of years of her own memories one at a time, as all small bodies had to run through every day; here, in the big body, she could see everything all at once.  As she sliced through the nothing, there was no distinction to be made between her mother of ten thousand years ago and her daughter of tomorrow; for she knew a daughter would come to her within the year.  She knew because time enfolded is no longer time; the landscape was set out before her, except that she couldn’t make anything of it, because she was a big brain now, not a little brain trying to separate everything.  When she separated, she’d come down, and all the particulars would flood in, but not now.

            Where was she going?  Hollany, that great colony of equality, or so they said.  That place where swamps coated the shell of the world, and land and sea were never separated.  Never enough water to make oceans, never enough soil to create continents.  Water and Earth combined over the whole of the shell to create a bog thousands and thousands of miles in circumference.  But there grew the apex of all food, that vegetable of the Goddess, the plant that made all sentient beings question their order in the evolutionary chain.  It made Margelle wish that her own people had never come up out of the oceans, that they had all stayed floating, swaying in the salty sea, instead of ever grasping for more, and coming up out of the salty brine with its mega-predators and ever so lack of fish to come up into the shallows, to find the schools of minnows there, and the place where no-one would eat you.  Why not set roots there, instead of signing on with these space-flying fish?

            Because this was a joining that no ocean could ever replicate; this was an enormity that could not be matched by cubic acres of salt water, sensing waves from all sides, not physical waves, but waves of the Underbelly, waves of meaning. Margelle could feel, in this place, the change coming.  She felt along her skin, and in her muscles, and eyeballs, and bones, that some change was coming, as it had come before and would come again, but some change that would cover the whole, instead of this or that part.  She knew the coming wave would sweep her along with it, and she had enough memory to know that she wouldn’t survive it.  Her daughter would do just fine, and in this state of traveling between, she was fine with a daughter living beyond, taking her memories and name.  When she separated, she would no longer think of a daughter taking on a mantle, but only of that coming wave, coming to sweep her along and disperse her into the empty sky.

            Zuzu moaned her mournful, thoughtful song, bred of millennia between the stars.  Margelle responded with her own hormonal-chemical song; they were ready to enter this Hollany system.  It was owned, Zuzu sang, knowing Margelle was high as fuck, and needing some grounding as the small people did, by Tsen, that planet of planets, where the small green men told the rest of the worlds how to govern their selves.  Owned, yes, Margelle responded, to show, if nothing else, that she still had her mind, it wasn’t lost yet.  This planet had a charter to form its own governments, so long as regular reports were sent; it was an authorized experimental planet, to keep up the illusion that Tsen ran under science, that testing and experiment, that positivism ran reigning among the bulb-eared aristocrats.  Each faction could test its own society, and give back report.

            Reports were then turned into propaganda, of course.  The free Tsen system allows alternative economical models to run their course, but only insofar as it doesn’t affect the freedom of those who choose the Prime Model.  And when the inferior models fail, inevitably sinking into the mire of the resource-scarce bogs of Hollany, that can only demonstrate more fully the perfection of the Golden Prime Mean.  Hollany was no backwater; its citizens were monitored as freely as anyone else, under strict contract.  One didn’t have to sign, of course, but without a signature, who would share their land?  Unequal rights mean unequal fights, as the saying went.

            Margelle felt again that she was letting her mind wander more than was good for it, or Zuzu, or the shipping orbits they were steadily and easily coasting into.  Round and around the sun they went, at an orbit of several standard gas giants out, easing themselves back into reality from the undertow.  As they emerged out, Margelle felt a fleeting panic, knowing that Zuzu could easily wrench through any system with the mass of a black hole, possibly tearing herself to pieces in the process, but more likely throwing planetary orbits into drift, shutting off suns, breaking up moons, and wreaking havoc with the laws of physics.  She felt, somewhere in the back of Zuzu’s mind, somewhere near the beginning of her childhood, that there may have been civilizations that looked up into the sky in horror and in fear of Zuzu’s people, and who wrote dark poems and told stories of the evil gods who came from the skies to tear seams out of the fabric of everything.

            The feeling eased, and Margelle was just herself, united with Zuzu only in the guidance systems and knowledge of their surroundings.  Now they were on the slow cruise into the system, where the ice melts and the radio waves hit hard and clear, spreading the music and talk of a world out for all to hear.  There was a tear, too, in Margelle, a memory of something essential missing now, only to be regained in another trip between that gap in space.

            This one had taken less than a second in real time, but was so tricky, and had required so many calculations spread between their brains, perfectly modeled in Zuzu’s vast, mutli-dimensional quantum biology, and approximated in Margelle’s (also vast, also quantumy) nervous system, that Margelle was exhausted, as if she had slept while swimming for weeks.

            In her this-ness-physicality, Zuzu manifested jets and ignited them with her own body’s heat to propel them in a wide arc toward the planet.  Margelle kept a watchful radio and quantum ear out for regular transport between the various populated planets, moons, asteroids, and free-floating colonies in the system; Hollany was, like most planets, spread through its system, every habitable inch of land spread over thin and thick with mutli-celled mammals (and others).  The bulk were Zone One Planet folk, of course, the marsh-people.  It wouldn’t do to accidentally absorb one of them into Zuzu; they might enjoy it for a moment, but once they were reconstituted, they didn’t work very well anymore.

            Zuzu spoke in the sweet singing vibrations that rocked her whole body and spread to any sensitive, eventually, in range.  “Why are we here, dear love?” she asked Margelle.

            “Don’t you remember, baby?” Margelle sang back.

            “Sure,” Zuzu lied.

            She wasn’t losing her mind, Margelle prayed, not yet, not yet.  She was always forgetful after a trip.  “We’re getting you something to eat, sweetie.  And Margie’s going to meet a friend.”

            “A friend?”
            “A very old friend.”  Hopefully still a friend.  Probably just another old hanger-on who wanted a favor.  But this one was a very, very old one of her own race, and she was bound by whatever vague sense of sisterhood her people still managed to dredge from their hearts these days.

            Zuzu hummed that she had especially enjoyed this trip, and she hoped that they would be able to take many, many more before it was all done.  She was tired, though, and thought she might like to rest and eat something.  She would like to manifest gils, and dive deep under the water and take great mouthfuls of algae into her until she was so full she thought she might crack her gorge and birth a new planet full of people.

            It was all a bit rambling, as the whole trip had been, and Margelle wiggled her body in the way her people had that meant smiling gently.  She needed to rest, too.  She was very, very old after all, and it seemed that everything around her was changing.  This was the worst place in the galaxy to come for stability, with so many free civilizations rising and falling all the time, but her own home hardly felt like home with so many young people coming out of their shells and diving into the water with no knowledge of Zuzu, and the other great Nakh, and the great empire that once spanned all the way to…

            To that place she heard now in her radio ear, the place whose name she hadn’t heard spoken in so many…

            “…planning to finally settle the great question of our time:

            “What should we do about Earth?”

Lower Middle Sauce (Ketchup)

Are the dogs getting enough exercise do I have enough in my checking for this coffee does the boy need more clothes how long can I go without getting that sound under the car checked is everyone at work talking about me is everyone at work ignoring me did I spend enough time with the boy will he be ok without an hour of math today why did I lose my temper at the dog is the grass too long to get with the push mower are the neighbors looking at the weeds on my front lawn how long will it take to do the laundry in the basement can I use oxyclean instead of detergent should I sell the house should we move should we take out a loan to pay the other loans is it ok that I prayed to Hermes even though I don't think he exists should I stop playing Pathfinder if I can't keep up with the basic rules should I just give up acting since I'll never make any money at it should I quit my job and move into the private sector do I have any transferable skills for the private sector should I get a haircut is adult acne normal how do people keep their houses so clean how do people balance their checkbooks how do these clients survive without any money can I justify averaging two lower paychecks so this client can keep her healthcare please send in your application for SSI let's start from the beginning let me get your case record number or social security number I'm behind on writing I'm not putting enough effort into theater I'm not putting enough effort into work I'm not putting enough effort into parenting I'm not putting enough effort into the dogs I'm not putting enough effort into my marriage is Erin happy would she be miserable if we moved what should we do for our anniversary is there enough in the checking to get flowers on the way out how many credit cards do I have where did that charge come from are the neighbors looking at me should I help my neighbor go to the store go away go away everybody go away stop not looking at me is the boy starving himself do I need medication am I anxious am I depressed everybody has unwanted thoughts it's only a problem if they stop you from doing what you need to do what do I need to do what should I stop doing should I stop thinking should I meditate or write more should I get off social media or use more social media I don't know enough to talk about anything I know too much should I read more fiction should I read more non-fiction can I share this thought or is that too much will the boy remember the good is this a good life for him what do I need does it matter what I need how can I stop thinking atheists are bad at philosophy but so is everyone else is America good am I good should I just give up should I try again does the boy need church does the boy need more friends do I need more friends I love him so much this poem doesn't have much to commend it for wordplay just present honesty start the whole thing again it's not such a bad life comparatively all the worries amounting to what good things to put energy into and leapfrogging over all this doubt and getting better at making decisions more quickly and then maybe earning a million bucks

A Brief History of Prayer

Our Father

Our Dad would sit as I'm sitting in his chair with a drink as my drink, his with ice and his smile smelling light of scotch and his kind eyes blue-shining like

Who art in Heaven

The sky as I would lay me down in my futon-converted bed in my upper room (the two sisters sleeping below with the spiders), crane-birds flying over the pillow under the inside-skull-world-- remember, the Norse held the dome of the sky was the skull of the first father, Ymir, who Odin Lecter-like sliced its edge and made his frosty, airy thoughts the clouds, glooming grey brains above us all, and below the brains the birds;

All-father Zeddies gently intoning the spells of Earthsea and Heinleinian libertarian litanies, and then, setting down the book, lacing his fingers while I turned and bowed my head and clumsy fitted soft hands to speak on their own

Hallowed be Thy Name

The prayers to What.  Don't babble like the pagans, the protestants repeat the Palestinian, not perceiving that this, this, this is not babble, this repeating, this rote,

Realize rote is full, not empty, the world is rote, the atoms of the sun rotely burst, the birds rotely lay their eggs, the small things fall to the large things rote, the beans fall to the soil and stalk the sun, the holidays come and Fridays end rote, and thereby a weary world is comforted at the end of the day by the speak that comes again, each iteration increasing in meaning, as every actor practicing their lines knows, so these yes Roman prayers fall leaf-like from my mouth in the fall of the day and sleepy wondering who speaking to do I

Thy Kingdom come

Sleep like everyone sleeps and dream like everyone dreams, incoherent life-chatter replayed with semblances of seeming gone and meaning broken on the giant's pate, when the separations cease and vision pulls meaning out of us like a faith healer pulls cancer-chicken-guts from the seeker's stomach; all sights, sounds, feinted senses robbed of intention and freed to us, the waking, to mean, and waking, semanticing the tongue flapping over the wind through our teeth

Thy will be done

I dream each prayer a bean planted, nourished by nutrients under, pulled up by their own cell's longing, inviting me to climb, climb, climb-- I always climbed, little Timmy grabbing tree-limbs as swinging up like any ape to the tops; no joy like the nestling at the tops of trees and spending the afternoon watching blue above from your human roost, and in dreaming going further up, grabbing green leaves to pull me up prayer-bean-shoots,

On Earth as it is in Heaven

Cloud-brain desires returning prayer-cloud electric fire through me again, growing in power, the rote steam sparks; fire returned down the yes-drenched bands stretched over, inside me as above me, infinite furnace filled with greater heat, white-hot glowing PLEASE not from me, coming from above and in and up again, small billowed early and breathed, breathed, breathed over over every night until seeing the castle above, the giants in the sky as we always knew they were

Give us this day our daily bread

Over the dinner, father-mother-sisters-brother, hands clasped and heads bowed, bless us, O Lord, in these, thy gifts, which we are about to receive, from thy bounty, through Christ our Lord, Amen, and even now I can recite without thinking this thanks, out of body into the small body I was, nose wrinkled at these, thy gifts, but remembering always the love and the peace and the reading at the table, and the knowing this was the only Heaven but still stealing from the sky-giants' mind

And forgive us our trespasses

But now I wake without a thing to show, the giant gold dissolved, the harp a cheap toy, the goose cooked, and the giant toppled, sky cracked open, rolled up like a scroll, fallen down the beanstalk

As we forgive those who trespass against us

But thank you to the real giant who filled my head with such fantasies


And lead us not into temptation
But deliver us from evil

But keep my feet on the ground now

Talkies

Little monster, little sun-belly explosion on top,

You are reading stories written for you in simple sentences of talking animals vs. overt cruel deformities, heartbeat or heart bleed brought ready to your unformed mental spaghetti with repeated short syllables, breakneck paced plots written out meandering slow, learning goat's tricks to keep trolls on edge until the deadly force propping up civil ties butts them finally off the bridge--

I can't take responsibility for all the weird narratives Mr. Film imprints on you, wary as I am, cautious as I am to move your eyes over pleasantries and hearty stories like vegetable soup, instead of putrid pop-40 pixelated pixies voiced by actors who will be old by the time you're young, but you love to repeat, repeat, repeat, you verse yourself in the verbals of our time, you rainbow record, etching your own grooves with your heart's stylus.

Just love the things I love so we'll have something to talk about when I'm forty-three and you're going to college, or shipping off, or trekking the Appalachians looking for Pennsylvania Sasquatch, starting an apprenticeship with the neighborhood self-driving car repairman, so when you come home we can reminisce about movies committed to the notched chemical-plastic strips before your grandfather was born.

Real things frighten me, so you might as well be scared by unreal unthings, and then teach me how to ride a bike, or fix a flat, or do algebra II, because I can't even tell you how to fix a sentence, let alone to conjure up monsters of your own.  Find some out there, bring them back here, and I'll tell you all about them.

I see you line up all your bitty dinosaurs made of dinosaur bits, and you're re-enacting the latest kid's movie craze, or you're standing on your bed reciting an entire episode of the Science Guy, or making up a Pokemon Quiz Show Game, and I see you staring off into the vast distance, I know you're thinking, you're thinking, and I'm thinking, are you just running movies behind your staring eyes, or are you wondering why Daddy goes to the theater some nights, or why we can't go mini-golfing every day, or wondering if you will be eaten by trolls--

Sometimes you let me in, but you are a virtually crafted meme machine, your dictionary bursts of pre-constructed sentences, mixed and matched and stitched together in your brain's meaning-quilt.  I watch your shows with you, Turing to your Enigma, and I will crack your code, little German T-machine, or I will stare at you until we are both just words-in-ourselves, and don't need simple Hollywood mechanicals to light each other's mouths.

Solstice Slacker

The long-light is leaving, only here for a day;
Shorter, shorter now
While under me the hurling drawer-in
String-tied to the sun runs ahead
Sweeping my year away too
Whether I like it or not

Yes, Geb, good first-born earth,
Burst your arm from the soil
Like the end of a horror movie
And grab my ankle with your grass-hairy mitt--
Take me along so every month before falls further behind,
So every missed key-stroke
And every bad grab at beginning
Dies long ago

What do I know about the Earth moving?
Empirical to me it's not,
Except when I'm stark drunk
And every fluid thought reels real;
I don't even see the stars move anymore.

Ignoring Douglas Spencer, I never watch the skies
You can't see stars in the city anyway.

Big-light barely matters,
Compared to the ceiling light torn out years ago,
Wires hanging stiff above,
Bulbs never replaced,
Rocketship ceiling fans languishing,
Old college BBB plastic snake-heads illuminating
Two rooms at once;
I thought I was older than this
But how would I know if I never see the sky?

I see screen-light, three now,
White in the dark,
The end of the cliched Platonic cave,
But no enlightenment after all,
Just light-shows instead of shadow-shows.

Screen-light never fails me unless I don't plug it in
They used to think you had to plug in the sun
With peoples' heads and hearts,
Who walked to the tops of pyramids
And maybe the last thing they ever felt
Was a priest reaching into their chest
And cutting out the beat from them
People the renewable resource
Saving us from peak sunlight

Or the ones who marched
To the stone arches to see,
See between for just a sec,
Unsure if the glow would show

The sun I don't suppose requires us;
We are the ones chased by wolves
Until we collapse
We are the ones in chariots driven by idiot boys
Who can't control the horses
Rolled by dung beetles, devoured by snakes,
Kidnapped by spiders and taken across the world.

We were worried about the sun for so long.
Now we don't have to worry, because the sun
Will do the same thing every year,
With occasional flares
To keep the electronic screens on their toes
I'd rather worry;
Now that I don't worry I don't care,
And neglect the light while it lasts.

I Don't Want to Stop

I was having a dickens of a time explaining to my wife, The Magic Condom Fairy, why I was so afraid of death, if I think death is just the end.  The following lyric, I hope, will clarify.

                                                                              Stop

My beloved wife,

How can I make you fear that great ending enough?

When I close I look and I see two black spheres; they join and fill everything, wrap around my head until I feel them behind me and all the way to my toes, I shrink and curl up into the dread, to the bottom of the endless ocean, and Leviathan, infinite jaws gaping, approaches to swallow the clear that was me.

Consider the alternatives.  Consider we are illusion, run on the Brahman mainframe, and so death is nothing to us, but a cloud over our eternal eye.

Consider that we are bodies, and something else, too, something untouched and uncrunched, dis-entropic goop or mist, and we flit from our corpses to another world or another womb.

Consider, though, that we are what we are, these muck-sacks, these ligaments and bloody tubes, these electrical puss-buckets, these calcium stalactites.  Consider our birth in the wetness and pain, and our coming into the light, and our eating and breaking apart of the world around us, the bouncing bounding particles of dust and light, the taking in of the muscles of our cousins.  All this broadcast iconography springing wriggling live from our brains, our bodies the extruders of this intruder, consciousness.  A meat grinder of mind, with the world shoved in and shat out.

Wrestling in the mud with the earth angels, fusing stars together and bursting sparks around til the mud blazes.  But consider that the operation is the sole cause of this thinking.  A computer mainframe made from sizzling steak, spitting ones and zeroes of red juice.

When it all breaks down, the energy, you say, the energy will run, spilling into other tributaries.  But the electricity, the kinetic heat was never the thing; the process was the thing, the jump and the bite and the neuron fire; the movement of the breast, not the breath at all.

When this one has stopped, when all the pieces have gone away from each other and devoured, that is when the great dark will come; the great end, the one that shouts "everything stops!" loud as a horse whisper.

How is that not to be feared, that stopping?  How to quell the wrenching in the gut, the twisting of the nerves, the flight of senses at the knowing of that end?  In sleep the idea of the quenching comes, and misremembered as rest; in the end when the meat sloughs off, who will be left even to fear?

Hamlet maybe said it better.

I don't want to stop, nor my child, nor my dogs, nor you.  If only I believed, then we could live again, together in another, better world, or as children finding each other in a mud puddle, or maybe two mice in a cabinet, or even ghosts to haunt the joyful places of the earth.

The world, you see, is a joyful rain of muck; every fierce hot anger on the neck, and salty holding back of tears in the corners of the eyes and mouth, every sprained knee, but also every mouthful of sour wine and whiskey, every smile to every person, every pizza, every movie and book and ignoring of friends, and laughing with friends, every coughing with the smoke of the fires or burning leaves, every missed chance, every bitter fluid regret in the back of the throat, every kiss, every hug, every holding apart, everything the great meat-clock records is better, better, better in every possible world than the ending of it.

If you can make me believe I won't stop, I won't stop you, I won't stop you from believing, from believing I won't stop.