Metatron
translated by Teemu Manninen
Sometimes I urinate on the lens of my camera, just to take pictures
of angels. Sometimes I spit on my glasses, so that the world might be filled
with angels. Deep blue is the protecting archangel Michael.
Pink is protecting, unconditional love.
Sometimes the world’s texture is like an axe. Violet represents
the avocado of spirituality. The white in a cucumber is strong
expression. All eyeballs, that have a path or a trail behind them,
move. Pastel shades are ugly colors.
This is a portal /
Angels protect the house and garden. These fairies are overjoyed
by presents. An earring found in a chocolate egg expresses immeasurable
love and goodwill. This is the angel that watches after
the gardener. This is a sun angel come down from the sun,
the guardian saint of bedwetters. This cat fights in her dreams
against evil spirits. The spitballs in its whiskers are
the goodwill of the angel Uriel. This floating blond ball near
the right ear is the angel that protects the man from the
vibrations that his instrument sends. From his blues.
His flapping backbeat. The elliptic whiplash of his
humongous enormity, his optically red eyes,
his laser sight,
his lips like butterflies. //
The blue pigment of his skin. His enormous desire
to find colors. His brother the angel Remiel,
in retinue with the great rainmakers of Satan, the great flatteners of everything.
This is a portal, there are many figures here /
This is Metatron. This is Gabriel. This is a lovecommunity.
This angel helps people to pass by. Here great energy is
transmitted into the ground. Here there are many elementals, much sugar.
This is the Holy Skeletor, who comes riding in and eats all the sugar.
This the sanctum sanctorum. This large white eyeball is the angel
who carries the manual of photography. That’s a unicorn. That’s a pig.
That’s Megatron, the pathological grey transformer. That up there in the ceiling
is the moon, a boulder that transmits love, healing,
oneness, by looking at that floating eyeball you can lift the water line
of skirts. These angels are on their way to the angel portal at Stonehenge.
The dust on the wings of these angels causes heart malfunction. This
is Seraphiel, whose wings are stained by fingerprints. He is munching
on fruit pieces like a little girl, watching all coy from the corner of an eye.
This randy ebony. This teasing little slut. These are
bodies dragged up trees, this is an epileptic seizure,
this sand blown in through the windows is Mount Zephon
ground to dust.
–
// This is Marilyn. Medicine changes Marilyn. Chronology is
a hindrance, Marilyn thinks. Marilyn is very agitated. You can feel
unbelievable beauty. You can vomit autumn laves and the great vulva
of spring. This is the angel Erelim. After I was fired from my last
job I took to driving a tractor across the country. On my travels
I found the angel Erelim. On my travels Erelim appeared to me.
In his grey whale enormity he flapped his fins in the dusk
of the morning sun, while small men scrubbed under the fins. These are
the low-frequency gutturals of pleasure. These caressing sounds
drive all the menstrual cycles of the vilage women out of sync. These
low bass tones like moist greenhouse shit, these
axel-spinning new cardinal directions, these holy septims.
These holy intimates. These holy primpriitprmtirpmit. These holy
septums. These holy quarts, pints, rectums, octaves and man-tails.
// This is Marcello, in the church during Toccata & Fugue.
This is Marcello eating a hard-boiled egg and biting on
a banana. This is the angel Daniel, the father genre of autogenesis, a rootless
hybrid and a humus-haired refugee, perfection of the turnip and the radish,
a jurotic transnate. This slowing time is the touch of an angel.
This slowing ppoint is like a ball like your head like your ball head in a streak
like your voice like a yak’s low like a quickened experience of time like
the experience of something like the speed of light like some kind of accomplishment
like a sticking.
Behind this is Unicron, the black scoundrel god and the gourmand
of planets. This large dude, this medley of incomprehensible
quantum machines. Nanoaids. The mother of all satan. The devil. My ewece.
A Section from Kronologi*
(translated by V. S. Luoma-aho & Kaija Rantakari)
* The title Kronologi has a double meaning in Finnish. It either refers to a logbook of chronology,
like a ‘chronolog’, or to a writer of one.
A museum, in which only the blind are allowed to touch the objects.
The wig is easy to comb, because you needn’t care about
the tangles causing pain. Existence is transmitted through
headaches of various degrees.
How many more ends will I yet find on my body?
Swimming in the eye of a great beast.
To support themselves, seahorses wind their tender tails
around those drowning.
There wasn’t any gray in your eyes, only blue in addition to the green.
A landscape, cold and vivid.
Monkeys and birds can vomit on each other without
anyone paying attention.
A suitable telescope for our reptile scales is yet to be developed.
Our sallow statues were originally as colorful as jubilant whores.
This has had an influence even on the fictitious architecture
of extraterrestrial alien species.
It was specifically the boomerangish shape of a horseshoe
that made the horses return.
She eats, reciliently arranging her food, poking and patting
the structure of the risotto with her fork.
Until the food becomes a house.
The trunk gets damaged, the fruit tree dies.
The ants erect a colony under the bark,
which peels off like a fingernail.
Even on the microlevel, plastic is based on repetition.
Just like hygiene. Roast, roses.
My nose got burnt in the sun. I see charred villages, people
slowly smouldering. Sparks in the ashes. The word is a finger
that points towards the moon.
The day is a regression in the system of man.
Eventually, it only ends up postponing pleasure,
whilst creating new possibilities for it along the way.
New sorts of rashes to scratch.
The structure of plants differs from that of the animals. Insects
adapt to change better than humans because they mutate so rapidly.
In my fist I clenched a block of ice, I felt its coldness,
I felt my body’s thawing power, I took a breath,
I opened my eyes.
Personality is a result of trauma.
Adolescent sex must be paid in the adolescent field.
A romantic would like the sand to polish progress
into a stone toe, which would be irrecognizable as a toe.
When you pull off the covers a dreaming face is revealed,
a haze still taking shape.
A pear left on the table changed its color, gradually greying
like lavastone; changed its shape, softened like the carcass of a great fish.
Not like Fall, but like falling.
I was allergic to optic facial cream.
She mistook my anafylactic shock for an orgasm.
Pain without meaning is chronic pain.
A cutlet turned into gravel and aluminum.
We tried to massage it back to life, little by little.
Bristles feel like dust or like some sticky kitchen smut
when you swab them with your wet finger.
When you cut your beard it ends up in your mouth,
in your hair, among other hair, in a bar of soap.
To prevent the fossil from forming, you need only water.
I wandered about the dwellings, trying to find feral columbines
and other proof of my being here, some millennia ago.
Whilst observing the great bird, I drink lemonade that corrodes
the surface of the ephitelium in a half an hour.
Ostriches breed unlike other animals.
They clone themselves.
I have started to live in the dark because light attracts insects.
In the cover of darkness they breed, their delicate
orange-brown transparency sleeps.
My cat returned after having been missing for years, the sheen
of insane adventures in its eyes. I inoculated it, I denied
the normal scales. Only natural sounds were administered.
It sounds like something extinct, something silver.
Water pours over the heads of fantastic monsters on the church roof.
The taste a red grapefruit and its cellular flesh leave behind on your palate.
A grimy pattern of standard-sized feet has formed onto the toilet floor.
Stomped by thousands, like the grooves of cartwheels
petrified on the streets of Pompeii.
It is impossible not to place your feet on those light, slightly protruding vestiges.
Great masses holler with the music, leveling those out of tune.
The moon on a forehead: translucent, ominous, ancient.
*
V.S. Luoma-aho (1984) is a finnish poet and translator living in Jyväskylä. He is a member of Poesia Co-operative. Luoma-aho’s poetics make use of swift transitions and stark juxtapositions mixing the mundane everyday with the epic and the absurd. His influences span from the surrealist fragments of Donald Barthelme to Hollywood movies, and science fiction. Luoma-aho’s poems have been translated into Italian.
