The anxious air, heavy, depleted of oxygen. The clock on the respirator is especially impatient. Numbers stuck, stuttering. The gauge seems to be broken. The copper arrow is as indecisive as the Ouija. Answers come with a vague simplicity or the oracle's promiscuous poetry. The words leave you nowhere to return. They rush forward into the moonless night. This planet has always been claustrophobic. The violet clouds, the blood-red rain, the way the rivulets cut into the blue clay, exposing chalk, exposing a hidden blackness. The soul of the world rises out of the abyss, from cracks in the desert, fissures under the sea, the noxious air coming from the vents of expiring volcanoes.
(This lava looks like psychedelic taffy oozing out of the sores, pumice the color of turquoise, steam that seems almost yellow.)
Waiting for night to fall, the cosmonaut ingests the medicine. In a little while, the spectral shift will happen. Simultaneously, his night vision will adapt to the impossible darkness. His eyes will lift the veil and reveal the stark otherness of the planet. He is waiting for the heat to dissipate into the density of the shadow. Stepping out of the armored pod, he takes inventory of his senses. It smells of meat barbequing... pause ...the space traveler realizes (too late) that this is the smell of his own radiant flesh. He is wrapped in elaborate layers of what can best be compared with aluminum foil. The setting sun is a gun aiming lasers into his heart. A lonely cupid.
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