The Tower

The thing rattles its cage it is a man it is a beast it is captive it is godlike. Black clouds gather, lightning, the vanguard of rain, crackles and illuminates through the cold cold window, its bars polished by centuries of clutching hands. In the city below, this tower can be seen from all points, a stone archolith, a black spire, stabbing the heavens, a spike held to the neck of pagan gods who crafted the earth out of venom so long ago. Gold coins fall into a wooden box. Far to heavy to carry, the treasure box sits along a row of such boxes in a deep vault, torch lit, location secret. One box for gold, one for silver, six for copper, nine for tin, bronze and the lesser metals. Even here, in the bowels of the black tower, gusts of wind from the north cause dust to rise in spiral eddies, torch flames bending and bending back again. More coins. A bony hand holds a particularly ancient one in its grip, admiring its age. It is from the time of heirophant Merovik, sixteen centuries ago, the face of the dead autocrat depicted in profile in its gold. In those times there was a second tower, and a third, one for each eye in the face of the true god. Coins drop. Cage rattles. The first downpour of rain starts suddenly.

They Are Called Arachnoids

The surface of Venus, dark under an impossibly thick cloudscape, nightmarishly hot, and dry as a bone under sulfur clouds and atmospheric pressure so intense the air ripples with every shudder of the air mass upon air mass nowhere for the heat to go. The crust seems solid but it is not, so hot it does not break into continental plates like our Earthly foothold instead the plumes make their way to the surface as vast and horrible bubbles, calderas of molten lava they rise to the surface melting the landscape and cracking it like pudding on a pot, bubble bursting and filling with lava, from space the affair recalls two dimensional spiders in some horrible web.
They tell me that meteors, falling to earth, one it was in Indonesia I think that killed a dog..five billion years in space before that dog existed and it nails the canine on the head with perfect accuracy it could happen to each and every one of us and we should live our lives knowing it. Those meteors have diamonds in them, tiny, and older than the solar system, made as the shockwave of an ancient supernova passed through its upper atmosphere millions of miles distant, debris of which precipitates the collapse of yet another starfield another sun another two dozen one, our own, adrift in the galaxy we shall never know which stars share a common origin with us.
Once again, I contemplate every lifeless globe out there unsung and beautiful never-to-be-observed and long for some dimension x, solids of which have already been described floating along the plane of imaginary numbers.

How I Spent My Summer Vacation

Lonely out in space, this vast starfield a shroud, woven of nebulae, wracked with cosmic rays, nurturing a million rocky orbs. A vast sea, dark as pitch except the occasional flash of lightning, warm clouds above, deck after deck of them, flecked with volcanic ash. Elsewhere, an icy orb, crystal lattice after crystal lattice left over from ancient volcanism, domes collapse and broken shards litter the landscape like a brawl between titans in some colossal glassware shop. Still farther and there are nothing but radiation clouds, lethal to some, nourishing to others, a neutron star at the center of them, degenerate matter so tightly compressed that time on the surface crawls and creeps a million ticks of the clock elsewhere to one subtle click of the second hand, were it even possible, on a surface that crushes matter into a single, vast and complicated, matrix of woven strings.
I long to be back home, clouds purring over an urbanized landscape, the sussurus of cricket calls at night, hot chocolate and donuts in the morning, meetings and late trains. Life and death, not annihilation and cataclysm.

Jupiter

We just watched mighty Jupiter, globe vast and dusky spinning fleet every ten hours a revolution, it crawled up the edge of a mighty scaffolding, like some Ptolemeic fluke the firmament was committed to measurement and mighty Jupiter raced like a pony. Or was it us that was moving, as you kept saying just as Jove spins earth spins likewise, but slower, and so much less to spin you could cram hundreds of our world in its cloud deck like bowling balls bouncing around the tilt a whirl at an amusement park all these rocky orbs in coplanar orbits not inevitable just luck because our star condensed the right way to produce a pleasant series of ellipse.

Jupiter, you could have eaten us, long ago, when the solar system was a few hundred million years old and accretional friction from all those tiny chunks of rock and planet you swallowed added up to braking and tighter orbits and thank god you ran out of things to eat on the way. It stopped you. And here we both are. Thank you Jupiter for all the deadly asteroids you have swallowed up over the years, bolides that could have smashed into the earth. I am sorry i never made it to the planetarium when you were eating Shoemacher Levy, it was a show, but I was going through an ugly breakup at the time. Still, getting out of the house would have done me good and there is nothing like astronomy to make a person wonder about things. Like bikinis. I am brutish and savage, a product of mammalian evolution and scratch me, yes, do it, you will feel the ape beneath the flesh, evolved from nucleic acid and opportunistic ontogeny, selfish dna and unselfish, slaughter and nurture, till neuron meet neuron and there we are, both on the balcony watching the sunset marveling at the tons of steel, iron forged in the heart of a red giant and carbon most likely cycled through a million cycads and jawless fish on the way to its status as a railing, protecting the both of us from some final oblivion. It is a shame that we only get to know so much.