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...

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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.

Transactional

These are the terms of the contract, they get:

• the money
• the adoration, power, glory, stalker
• the celebrity lifestyle, drugs, divorce
• more money
• the early, tragic death

—and we get:

• the new series, roughly once a year
• the box set
• the posters, action figures, spin-off novels
• t-shirts
• to pay for all of the above

...and pretty much the same thing applies to pop and film stars.  Who's to say who's getting the better deal?

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Transactional

What then, of folk like me, a touch
aloof in uncool sweaters.  If you knew me better
—or us, as I should say, I'm not alone—perhaps you'd like
the way we stir our coffee, too intent;
or fail to clearly speak and consequent
from that...  we give ourselves away.

What then, of how we misplace all our lives
to long-run TV drama shows?  What time
are you on?  Why are you out-of-sequence—
this episode's from Season One, when Joe
was not yet dead, and Lisa not yet gay.
You seemed happier then, so you also

have given yourself away?  Oh let me take
you hand in mitten, and let me buy you coffee,
from the van beneath the CCTV.  I watch
your eyes behind the steam?  Sometimes I dream
of one like you, tight-sweater ghost from a past
your writers don't provide.  And you dream too,

perhaps, of lives like mine, or ours—
as really I should say.  Ambiguous, we are;
not telegraphed with what to feel; not healing,
albeit imperfectly, between one story
and the next; not sent the text by courier
before each scene begins; we are—beyond all else—

not the one half-dressed upon the poster
whom we—not so aloof now—return to
through moments in our desperate night. We treat
it as our right, and maybe that is fair
you are repaid so many ways, and I'm always
your loyal customer, when you give yourself away.

E pluribus unum

I forget whence this poem originated.


I have a half memory that somebody may have raised a challenge but whether it was to write in the plural, or to bend the rules of grammar I don't know.  Possibly it was to adopt an alien persona of some variety...


So anyway, herewith the aforementioned poem.  It's not exactly a puzzle, but you may get some way through before you figure it out...

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E pluribus unum


like really you say that
as if it were a clever thing
and I (plural) am watching
your picnic from seven hundred
viewpoints in the long grasses

and there is only one of we (singular)
and it's not our queen
because, OK, there's only one
in here and we're organised around her
but she's still only a part of the machine

and I (plural) am the machine
and we (singular) are all the parts
and I am watching you
and I am already
in
the
sandwiches

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Note: the first sentence of this posting is grammatically correct... "whence" means "from where."
So "from whence" is arguably tautology, although apparently it has also been in use for a long, long time...