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