Mike McCormack - Solar Bones

somewhere above the earth the sun failed

burned out from within, exhausted now and nothing but a massive cinder drifting through the chasm of space, collapsing in on its own warm core before that too collapsed on itself so that all light was now residual, ashen and dragging its own darkness down the void as all around me every colour waned to its specific darkness, all things slackening and run down while

time itself began to contract so tightly

it would surely freeze at any moment and

any moment now, there will be no now and

there may be these things but

none of these things

will be now

to see myself

lying in that car, stretched out behind the steering wheel with my body locked in its final throes, my left arm thrown across the passenger seat, clutching Mairead’s prescription in my hand, my whole upper body twisted towards it with

my foot rammed on the accelerator and the engine gunned to the last, the car screaming at a hundred thousand revs, screaming

this is how an engineer loses himself

no accuracy anymore, all my angles tilted to infinity

finally unbound from myself into

a vast oblivion and

what was needed at this moment was not prayer or song but one final moment of desperate strength-gathering so that I might utter some bawling, annihilating curse, some anathema drawn up from the depths of the world’s being where all inverse prayers are rooted in the first gasp of the world’s existence, the first twitch of the void, something I could draw from these depths and lay on the world only because

man and boy, father and son, husband and engineer

I have known it to be a sacred and beautiful place, hallowed by human endeavour and energies, crossed with love and the continual weave of human circumstance, and since

this is my wit’s end

my post mortem aria

my engineer’s lament

with my mind vacant of everything good and affirmative, it is the place from where I will give vent to some terrible curse, rolling it from my black mouth across the vast acreage of space, rolling it to its furthest horizons and further again so that it chisels a new edge to the universe, working itself out to the staggered depths of the void where in this moment God might hear me and come looking for me, recognising a fellow engineer, my howling curse the sound of a decent man gone to his grave too soon, a man who went about his work and raised a family, everything about him marked by that degree of moderation which he could now set against the darkness out of which he would come looking for me, as I did for him, ever hopeful of finding our way to each other in this blackness which is our way and guide, down into the thickening night where prayer and curse are conjoined at the one root in the inaugural moment of being, down into those depths where only true believers can find their way, those with the light drained from their eyes so that they can have full night vision and access to the complete absence of themselves where, hand on my heart, I can say

I died in that lay-by

died surrounded by tons of sand and gravel and hard-core with my mouth open in a black howl to take leave of myself as, without missing a beat

my body had already picked up the rhythms of decay which had begun to work immediately in my soft flesh, that momentary heat spike which gave way to the falling temperature of rot with my blood passing from oxygenated red to black as the universal cellular explosions which bring on that spillage of filth within my organs which will eventually purge from every orifice of my body even as I

found my way home

home again

to sit at this table

and drift through these rooms

room by room, agitated beyond all comfort, as if the giddiness of this day had got into my body and is now setting up again that grating current inside me which brushes my nerve ends and has me so jittery there is nothing for it but to keep moving, drifting from room to room like one of those sea creatures who cannot stay still for fear they may sink and drown, everything solid in me draining away towards the floor, going from

room to room

killing these couple of hours before my wife and kids return, trying to shrug off this sense that all things around me are unstable and barely rooted in the here-and-now and that the slightest pressure will cause everything to tip away from me as if it were all cardboard scenery or, like this house, that the slightest push will send the whole thing skyward into the grey light leaving me

am

alone here in the open space of the world with no walls or roofs or floors around me, the sole inhabitant of a vast, white space which is swept clear of fences and homesteads and plants and trees, all gone, the world as complete erasure since even the sun itself is drawn from the sky leaving me wholly alone, fading in whatever way it is we fade from the world

animal, mineral, vegetable

father, husband, citizen

my body drawing its soul in its wake or vice versa until that total withdrawal into the vast whiteness is visible only as a brimming absence so that finally there is nothing left, body and soul all gone, and these residual pulses and rhythms which for these waning moments, abide in their own recurrent measure, nothing more than a vague strobing of the air before they too are obliterated in that self-engulfing light which closes over everything to be

cast out beyond darkness into that vast unbroken commonage of space and time, into that vast oblivion in which there are no markings or contours to steer by nor any songs to sing me home and where there is nothing else for it but to keep going, one foot in front of the other

the head down and keep going

keep going

keep going to fuck