Making out with Proteus

I've not posted enough this year.

But I did post during NoPoWriMo and one of the poems was There's very much a multiverse - a casual, and probably acausal, dissection of life in a quantum multiverse.

Proteus is the eldest son of Poseidon; called the Old Man of the Sea, he is a shapeshifter.  He could also foretell the future, but hated to do so.  Probably because of the temporal turbulence that causes.  So, to make him do it you had to wrestle him and he would turn into horrible things...

In that poem I committed a sin of a type that used to annoy Douglas Adams so much that he created an improbable sperm whale as a way of getting back at us about it.  e.g. I created a character for the reader to care about, and then discarded them without explanation.

OK, I didn't kill her off, but I did leave her in a quantum superposition of p_kissed = 0.5 and p_punched = 0.5.

I subsequently felt a bit bad about her situation.  I thought I should get her out of it.

She turned out bisexual in the process.  There's no social or political meaning behind that, it's just that in her world anybody can become anything, so what can you do...

Anyway, to quote Adams again: This is her tale...

---

---

Making out with Proteus


And when our lips meet, his face unfolds
not à la Hellraiser or Resident Evil
but more like topology, mathematical;
an object that, rotating, shows
where I thought it simple, I was wrong...

...it seems we're every one of us a world, cityscape, a throng,
a crowd scene filmed in Technicolor and
just as I think I have absorbed that one
there folds out of the multitude a female face.
So I kiss that too.

I'm taller and she tilts her head,
there's just a touch of breath across my lips,
before they brush on hers.  There is no rush,
but when I pull back, wanting to see her eyes,
she winks

and then her whole body unfolds.
And I half fall, and step, but now I'm walking
through her... him... them... the plurality
ambiguity meaning nothing, in this unplaced untime
and they are still unfolding all around

and I'm walking through their whole world now:
past a booth, where a bakelite telephone is ringing,
through faded dark green curtains onto
a late-night street with distant drunken singing,
towards the only open place: a coffee shop

and as I go I feel the ghosts of kisses,
punches, traffic accidents, hands on zips, caresses
the flash of lust,
or possibly tactical nukes,
the glass in front of me explodes

the world goes dark
and the spinning fragments form a field of stars
so vast and deep and hungry now I know
that this is perfect love for me
a warm heart-shaped infinity, not limited

to any single name, identity or gender,
not always tender, not even always undoomed,
but although infinities can come in different sizes,
my subset of the multiverse is precisely
the same size as the whole.  I can choose,

if I wish, only to live the lives
where I'm with this lover,
and infinity again, is still as large
after this dissection.
It is the working of affection

to compute the intersection
of every possible world where there's a you
with every world where there's a me
and love the result
and if I now take one more step,

I can kiss the stars.

NaPoWriMo - 2018 - Day six - there's very much a multiverse...

there's very much a multiverse...

The multiverse, earlier in what we may as well call "today"

...and anyone says otherwise is saying something different in some other world than this you gave her a kiss and just the same you punched her solidly in the solar plexus but there is no nexus of universes no group of places more or less real you are the saint and martyr monster non-entity and plastic penguin wash machine designer in equal measure you have such leisure to explore the multimultimultiplicity of things and thingness and you might conclude that nothing matters why struggle when every act is going to play out whatever why try when here you are just getting by and some other you in another place that is this place but "other" if you know what I mean is leaning on his golden balcony and shouting to his mistress that he will not need the Rolls now after all what with the telegram from the World Bank and you are you and all the shades of you and all these people blurring together in a smear scooped from the larger melange of peopleness and some yes you would say are definitely you if with added combat knife or virtuoso violin but others again are close to youspace but not quite in it there is no hard limit and around the edges you blur imperceptibly as if anyone is perceiving this but stay with me because around the edges you blur into everybody else you know or might have known and there is out there somewhere the you which is fifty-fifty between the man you think you know and Keanu Reeves and there is the one that's sixty three percent Diana Dors and all the shadings into Hitler of which we shall not speak and equally there's the version which is exactly half way between you and God and there's all of this and more more than you imagine more than you can imagine more than you can imagine imagining even if some of you can imagine a lot so you may think there is no point persisting in being the you you are but do carry on because if nothing matters cosmically then here and now it still matters to you and me and I'm sure we can do better and there is a view that there isn't even a multiverse and that all there is is every possible state of the universe just thrown together in an random pile and that time only appears to exist because some states of the universe appear to encode a past and in this view nothing may be real nothing may last seven seconds ago might be a fiction and seven seconds in the future might never come and given that you are the fourteen second you then you should be who you are with all your might and given that yes given that YES! I believe I will have that drink...