Adam Cornford

from MILLENNIUM: A Topology

Towers

Millennium dateless the silvery metal of the future
itself desire and calculus in dualistic alloy
millennium sky-domes aerial highways antenna forests flying cars
traffic like innumerable mercury beads gliding
over under immense catenary harps of suspension
between capital Towers as tall as streamline gods turreted
with polygonal glass masks noble transparent faces a hundred yards high

visible through each Tower face an Authority cerebrum
office colonnades brilliant with dials and screens
wink like neurons under pure information light
millennium millennium millennium endless data cascade
runs down buildings in molten silver
like cold Niagaras needed to cool the quintillion sparkle vacuums
of electronic world brain in the stratosphere Tower
control code haloes out over phone lines and RKO broadcast lightning

little pale men in suits peered at downtown towers New York and Chicago
their eyes tracking up windowed cliff-walls like snails of glass
as the century rolled over a huge dynamo's first revolutions
their millennium all Europe extends vertically into stratosphere
each nation a specular capital Tower radiating
transport lines bright steel ribbon blades out across the globe
to wrinkled colorful continents of jungle and ore
colonies intricate friezes of dark muscle dancing through myth-space
toward the perpetually deferred present in window displays

millennium Towers where the pale men dream themselves thinkworkers
hurrying across tessellated Escher floors bearing knowledge bits
crystal sugar fragments to and fro in skullcaps bright skintight coveralls
wide-eyed adjusting instruments or tasting clear red nutrient jelly
dream themselves energy masters leaning underlit
over vast blueprint table where the Plan spreads out pushing back
frontiers of spacetime driving the masses along moving walkways
down bright ceramic tunnels elevator shafts hydraulic
of work power orchestras hands moving in unison endless processing

the Towers keep rising from polygonal green park belts field belts
trees are lichen to them mountains mere landscaping clouds
drift past herded by humming climate airships as the Towers move up
millennium Towers magnetic poles drawing language fragments
toward them from all directions all points encompassed
along the airwaves assembling reconciling in vaulted pinnacle chamber
until the universal speech takes shape among serpent energy arcs
perfect steel mirror sphere truth moon infinitely faceted its rays
defining the planet an illuminated forest of ascent
 

Ships

Millennium Ships the bright teardrops of invasion descend in
fire-tipped swarms pattern out above our cities like stratus cloud formations
prophetic echo voices tell us our fate resistance is useless
the agents float out in their flexible reflective suits
inhuman lucidity gazing coolly from behind each visor
figures for mere power's wish to crystallize
beyond the desk the confused papers phone calls headaches
the cockroach lusts numerous, quick, ineradicable
the small pale gravity-smeared body into pure knowledge

the Ships are intelligence bombs exploding slowly as silvery lilies
with geometric pollen of irreversible transformation
breathing it we become Other all that we fear or wish to be we
become collective God funnel up like aurora waterspout into hyperspace
while somber envious agents look on like fallen angels
we become naked Bosch bodies suspended in nutrient tanks
slaved as control system nodes for an automatic planet factory
become food animals fattened on giant engineered fruits
under perfected world-State parasol anaesthetized by peace
or scavengers ragged scurrying along seams and conduits
of the titanic colony dodging bulbous extermination machines then
carried on Ships as crawly radio vermin out among the stars

Millennium Ship visits of tomorrow to yesterday
the luminous vertigo egg hovers above a Cro-Magnon moraine
bathing shaggy chanters in its logic nimbus
hovers above a stepped Aztec pyramid its lenses recording
torn hearts crimson in juniper smoke hovers
alongside a fluted immense Tower where data priests
transmit new hunger to half a continent in on-screen showers of grain
the luminous egg appears multiplied as a Boccioni angel matrix
in infinite regression in the alchemist's mirror transmitting
the heavenly word coded unbreakably with Elohim key

Millennium Ships are bardo enforcers overseeing
our reincarnation in unknown form embodiment both of the modern
rear-brain burned-in certainty that not even Nothing stays
the same and the simultaneous hope that Nothing is not
what we will be before long ashes of a dead branch on
the life-tree Ships beaming like the glittery redundancy of beetle species
from Darwin's eye like the coincidence of particles coalescing
in first nanosecond of this universe and swimming
upstream through bubble nebulae to us and beyond
where our descendents shrug off their electric-eyed bodies by now various
and symmetrical as snowflakes to plunge through night's meniscus
and one last Old Human watches while the earth's liquid iron cortex
releases its final thoughts as heat and breaks up
 

Parenthesis: Aviator

(Millennium Aviator law guardian in arachnid armor
confident hawk-nosed platinum-haired
holding his helmet like a giant vacuum tube under his arm
explains calmly to post-civilized barbarians their error's
geography and when they fail to put away archaic spears and rifles
he signals the peace armada droning sky dreadnoughts overhead
to stop-motion them with white sleep cloud bombs
walks into their dreams engineer lugging his repair kit
rewires their Heaven as Logopolis patching Necessity into the god circuit
so technician legions can fan out from huge desert aerodrome
assembling scorched human warrens scattered
over desolate earth into the vast glassy simulacrum Man

now grandson Aviator snaps out of G-faint at five miles up
from dreams of being played by intelligent piano in his skyscraper flat
Etudes traveling through his fingers as the pulse-emblem of civilization
among transparent Tower spires that keep rising like stalagmites

whose neighborhood in their lengthening shadows we never
discover who maintains the monorail humming by on parabolic track
like optimization curve who washes the luciplast windows who
crawls through the service cores clotted with oil and dust
who are these myriad gioconda telephonists embroidering
global network from arterial wire skeins and socket boards

these questions nothing to the Aviator elite fighter for WorldGov
under his goggled mosquito airmask he smiles pulls out
of the power-dive banks his ornate silvery ship into hairpin turn
the desert wheels below under shadows of air pirates
now like Apollo's arrowhead ship comes out of the sun
wing cannon rippling arpeggio vibration through the cockpit
enemy flyer matte symbolic black peels off smoking like a sacrifice
to Ratiocracy blinding disk overhead sacrifice
to Aviator's voice through Azure Squadron's headphones reasserting
formation tactics in his calm thrilling overman tone

Soon the last pirate plunges into the sand bursting remotely as
Marinetti's fire-chrysanthemums on Abyssinia
the pirates' target vast white cargo dirigible floats by skysailors visible
waving from its decks in gratitude we
never discover why still pirates why rebels under blue solar dome
of the perfected State allocating by hyper-eugenics four-
dimensional spiral seraph staircases which predestinate
each citizen to correct function and status at birth

these questions nothing to the Aviator small pale man being played
by his typewriter in a rumpled laundry cloud basement flat)
 

Factories

Millennium silvery metal of the future luminous larva
hatched from miles-deep tree-diagram mines below the cordilleras
by giant caterpillar drills then loaded
on teardrop-headed trains underground zooming through electric tubes
smelted in skyscraper furnaces rolled out as a continuous flow of thunder
swayed up in sheets by magnetic cranes to be
stacked in blank future-mirror books ready to warp into narrative
as energy cash data flow masters lean underlit
over a vast blueprint table where the Factory Plan spreads out
far above the actual subterranean work city panopticon slum
where the colorless downcast proles herd down ceramic tunnels
into freight elevators metonymized into work power hands
moving in unison endless processing millennium Factory temple
of the Automaton rising from a spark-throne masked as their desire
exoskeletal dancer pursues the last humans down a welding aisle

or: millennium Factory of jointed arms under the transparent arcade
where imperatives are assembled one after another
each fifty-meter silver cylinder a complex death sentence its dependent
clauses hooked wings crystalline viewports weapon pods
millennium Factory among hangars, blast pits, engine test beds
dynamo vaults of Egyptian lion grandeur spinning invisibly fast
catwalks where engineers pace in reflective TV-god headgear
over reactor pools glowing blue as a Poussin sky
not actual brown-grey sky outside the force dome shielding this work city
from enemy bombs also enemy air penumbra of the endless war

of course millennium Factory complex is stalked by an alien spy
ropy-arm brain-bag coiled inside a life-size marionette or
a flickery hypnosis field of "normal employee"
outside agitator leading technicians into doomed egalitarian revolt
amid millennium millennium millennium continuous polyphonal thrum
white noise music of the war sphere Earth ruled
by a sword-wing stag-beetle angel with closed-circuit eyes

or: millennium Factory where four billion miles of relays open and close
devices flash money voltage at each other beacons of accumulation
as they ascend and descend in macroeconomic labyrinth
tiny managers cross gangways above bottomless pounding shafts
to the control room operated by pure mind power
deserted Factory produces itself endlessly dreaming energy demons
of all the rebellious bored intelligence captured
by its radium camera-clocks distilled in its colossal alembics
until no workers left among the crackling towers only this desire beast
fire-polyp apotheosis of the interlinking cyborgs we have become
preparing to melt through into the control room where dials flicker red

Millennium coin of the solar empire capital's creation myth
 

Mars I

Mars millennium planet of imagined endings
at first always eastward from here as Venus was always south
dusty ghost world inhabited by the pyramid specters of universal history
hydraulic civilization of engineer princesses in bronze kilts
born from eggs technowizards warriors and slaves
where Anglo Race Science metastasizes out of skull dimensions
and skin tone into multiple species: green four-armed fanged and
primitive or giraffe-tall feathered courteous and philosophical
all though conduct their wars or rituals in mile-deep canyons
dependent on the air machines gleaming Karnak-scale pumps and retorts
like artificial hearts for this rust-globe of machine age fear

yes fear Mars its dry-town labyrinths aflicker with knife and flute
fear of soul parasites or giant squid-sunflower magicians
awakened from centuries of stony sleep in their forgotten symbolic caverns
under the desert by enterprising Earth explorers
whose subjectivity they crumple like an expired contract
into zombiehood or worse a venom-junkie's sweaty ecstasies
of servility like Renfield gulping flies in the asylum
stand-ins for the pale terrestrial energy masters voluptuously worrying
about every order that preceded them or that still offers resistance
first undead aristocracy silkily sipping bourgeois blood
now shadowy webwork of libido canals crisscrossing
the rose-red brains of the supervised classes
inscrutable mazes of laziness mechanical cooperation or revenge

fear Mars millennium planet rich in entropy and forbidden knowledge
history's outline tapering into the steel-bright teardrop of invasion tomorrow
superimposed on yesterday by cool intelligences
of the "dying world" brain-bags who pace delicately on their ropy ganglia
as viewed through quartz vertigo egg in the dusty shop
of objects demagnetized from the commodity-field and pulsing with
semiotic flux as Breton would soon discover
wandering streets where war's future had torn into wide flickering holes
the fissures in air through which Wells had glimpsed it

these cerebral Mars medusas the asymptote of technocratic evolution
now here sagging in terrestrial passion's gravity
depend on their empire machines glittery walking tripods whose
reverse-camera rays indifferently slice howitzers pine-trees clergymen
churn fields into fuming slag, towns into rubbled lots
scatter whole populations into grubby vagrancy
in basements as the silver specular Towers advance
but the new rulers gazing catlike from under reason-swollen cortex brows
are finally overcome by barbaric micro-organisms to which they lack
resistance withering inside their power armor yesterday
superimposed on tomorrow reverse conquistadores as we are
 

Mars II

Superimposed on tomorrow reverse conquistadores as we are
as other Martians emblems of colonial guilt, brown-skinned and graceful
in their masks of gold leaf like leaves are withered and charred
by our childhood diseases leaving a glass harmonica city
crumbling beside the dry canals its echoey pagodas
reveal wind-hieroglyphs like those the Renaissance imagined encrypting
the generous alchemical wisdom of Aegypt yet these turn out
to be closed to us like our childhood books and when trespassed
become a kaballah of subversion of shapeshifting
last survivors who mirage Earth spacemen's lost brother dead mom
unaccountably alive and welcoming on the lemon-shade porch then
grinning like heat lightning advance firing metal bees to pierce them
thus revealing this longed-for story of a Towerless past —
orderly houses lace rainfall bells independence meadow fireworks — as
a whitemare distilled from indigenous bones and African sweat

old fear brown Martians even after their extinction propel us
into endless becoming Earth bodies trapped opened
in symbolic caverns by their robot scalpels under giant crystal microscopes
organs replaced by circuitry skin sewn up and sent back to us
programmed to kill and tell truth: guilt-shadow of the Automaton
as Martians themselves fade out into a mosaic
image of bouldered vermilion wasteland where they never were

millennium Mars dry branchwork of history canals crisscrossing
the once-red brains of the supervised classes waiting
for liquid possibility's lock gates to be lifted
burnt-out technicians rebels artists communalists and the neocolonized
board colony ships riding fusion honeysuckle up out of summer
independence fireworks that never detonate or fall back

Mars now always westward from here a guiltless Last Place
new brown human Martians creole world-gardeners with knife and flute
unfurl photosynthesis over the ochre pebble fields
true air-machines countless microscopic engines of the chloroplasts
as climate domes bubble up from crater floors, cling to canyon sides
a life like the air bright sharp and perilous never before breathed
millennium Martians elaborate their rituals reconfiguring the Clan trope
via halls of optical-fiber tapestry and sandstone totems federated
under grass the hopeful flag of oxygen's disposition

millennium Martians brown two-legged radio bees of the invisible
pollen from Gaia bearing her transhuman metaphysics as well as
culture's distinction-hive a miniature pluriverse they
swarm to defend it their implants abuzz with data on the steel raindrops
descending EarthCo troopers in power armor ordered to reassert the empire
of Already over Yet even as the archaic clock-god concealed
inside capital's absent present rusts and its Towers crack in the dry wind
 

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