FORBIDDEN PLANET

Adam Cornford

A call for help is addressed to the future, but which future will answer?

Blind but crowded with eyes, the gigantic lens outpaces light.

Even now, manhood is grey, good-humored, and efficient.

To re-enter time, we must stand silent inside columns of glass.

Beneath us, an absence of cities and the idea of cities.

Far from its origin, a branch breaks off the tree of instructions.

Radio: to refuse help, to warn (to threaten), to guide (to threaten).

Descent into a landscape defined by jagged renderings of the sublime.

The alchemist automaton, quick with forces, slow in gait and speech.

Total suburb: house built on limitless energy, property circled by limitless absence.

A philosophy can shut its eyes when its garden becomes menacing.

The survivor hides his innocence from strangers and his guilt from himself.

Doorways, like coffins, reveal the proportions of the always inhuman dead.

To speak: to perform magic using vast apparatus one has neither designed nor understood.

The receding vistas of technology, where power flows from the vanishing point.

Three impulses in young women: befriending wild animals; flirting; fashion.

All objects contain great generators, mysterious motions, deep shafts into fire.

A mirror that needs a mirror in which to see itself without seeing death.

To lift weights without using one's muscles, to assemble a child from sparks.

The tiger of wrath disintegrated by the horseman of instruction.

Murder is a product of evolution, its body a product of invention.

Reason asleep produces monsters, but only when its logic is left on.

Becoming visible in the force-fields of male fear, female desire.

Understanding washed away by its own carrier-wave of light.

Your will presses its burning name through every door you close against it.

Death: all the dials gone red, infinite energy meeting itself head on.

The bride with her bachelors leaves her father bare as a star.

←

→