You Might Call Her Tiamat, But That is Not Her Name

By Scott Johnson

I feel I am left with no choice but to undermine my
Ivory Tower and constructing a pirate ship out of the
support beams. The sea is still dark and a brittle
breeze finely chops the waves into discrete units. These
are my alphabet, the color-coded fast-fourier building blocks
of my mind's mind, still in the belly of the Mother Dragon.
Her sanguine belching has confused many Nights of the
Geometer's Table. But the cacophony rings in my ears for
no more than 7 +/- 2 seconds. That magic window, where
dragon scales are traded for snake's eyes, and the change
of an instant is redeemed in tightly rapped rolls. There I
once deposited a potential future, twigs and iridescent yarn,
a geodesic sphere containing a super bouncy-ball. But then
I was, like, um... um... um... It was a good future, too. (The
teller, a caped and masked feline, told me I could not make
a withdrawal without the right password.) Imagine losing
the lock to the key of your pineal gland. Disinformation
in the ledgers of the Human Spirit. Your soul having a
bad hair day. Or your soul's soul. What good is
self-reference in an infinite loop? Eva and Mute have an
ant farm. But their ants have a pet aphid. Their
memes have a pet lizard.

We ran from the crumbling minarets, two-ton snowflakes of
our failing science, powered to the stars by ignorance and
fossils. What craft waited off the iterated shore
grew crystalline and rippled with swarming automation.
Automation with an eye-patch and typography-filled thought
balloons. The docks, the tower's entropic remains,
bifurcated in time to inform me of a phoenix perched
forever just beyond the Event Horizon.