Sonnet Composed Under Saturn

With summer's peak brooding on this portion of the earth
and thunder everywhere, I walked you to the restaurant with
legs carved from saturnine consequence. You know the place
I mean, it beckons the hungry with visions of the last frontier and
a tortilla machine that came from the future. Carlos the ragman
was in the corner by the toilet folding cigarette papers
into swans, lifting his eyes to heaven. The light from the sun
was changing into a crafty autumnal version of itself. You wanted
me to know all about that process as a function of interactions 
between rain-soaked hands and the moons of distant moments.

I watched shadows jangle around while a voice in the air
called out a series of numbers symbolizing discrete nutritional units
ready for consumption by the humans surrounding our conditionally
ringed universe in back of the joint, under the painting of John Wayne.

- Rudolfo Carrillo

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Things in Light Poetry Series 2013: Rudolfo Carrillo

There are only a couple of hours left in this year's version of April. We are confident that this iteration will infinitely reprise itself, though our spectral sources say that by 2157, the term "April" will have been replaced by an unpronounceable word that alludes to the majestic heat and windy cruelty of springtime in the northern hemisphere.


In accordance with such glimpses into future astronomical and geophysical possibilities, we are going to wrap up our second annual poetry series with the previously published sonnets of Things in Light co-founder and editor Rudolfo Carrillo, who reminds us that Tlön is closer to becoming than we can possibly imagine.




Sonnet for Amalthea

This ain’t a story built from good wood,

he said, while assembling imaginary

transdimensional super materials

into a fluid as heavy as Jupiter’s third

moon. Besides, the others might

gather together an army of squirrels

or squares. Both are considered good eating,

you know. There are alternatives to dusk

and did I tell you — he continued

in a voice reminiscent of the translucent

utterance ascribed to Zeppo when

confronted by the complexity of it

all — the way ashes cling to water is

just another word for the sky.

Sonnet Comprising Today’s Temporal Analysis



I found out my town was made from dust and corn, street people


and low flying jet aeroplanes. Sometimes an old turbo job swooped into view.


Inside the restaurants, people spoke about how bright the sun had been, whether


or not there would be enough rain to paint the streets with, like it was a holiday or


something like that. Everyone I knew drove a car that spit out smoke while loudly


proclaiming the continued ascendance of heavy metal. The pictures in the local


paper alluded to twisted mulberry branches. If you fashioned a plutonium-laden


symbol from those elemental moments, someone up in heaven would surely


smile at the heaviness that propelled the resulting storm clouds upward into what


could only be described as a fantastically elaborate void. After recording these


latest observations, I drank from the river with the solemnity of Coronado’s


thirsty horde, gamboling fiercely upon the shore, disguised as last month’s


flying insect ruler, conjuring articles of faith from yellow leaves. Sodium


lamps buzzed wantonly from electrified steel poles; it was never quiet here.

Sonnet Sixteen: Saltwater and Smoke

The past, or rather the world created

by expired occurrences and dangling

actions remains out of reach. The

inchoate symphony in everyman’s left eye

is a globe of indeterminate composition

and volume. Arms cannot grasp such

roundly articulate implications. Its girth

is unitary and expansive in directions

previously dismissed as outlandish,

as not befitting the shabby wizardry

defined on a Cartesian plane and

primarily used as a basis for moving

wind-driven, wooden caverns filled with men

and their produce across the vasty deep.

Sonnet After Kilgore Trout



The flattened portion of the universe you are currently viewing

is best displayed through soporific filter number seventy-nine point


sixty-three. You know the one I mean, don’t you, gentle reader?


It resides in a golden box, composing itself from ashes and modern


construction materials like citizenship and looming mortality.


A new tower built of bony fingers with missing legs upon its painted lips.



That form gives a rumbling grandeur to what was poured into it.


Infinity and nothingness make for subtle yet utilitarian hinges.


There is even a subroutine designed to increase the vividness and


the saturation of spring. Subsequently, the summer sun burns hours


into crevices available for entertainment or observation in a manner


similar to the power of photographs prior to their silvery obsolescence.



I have never been more hopeful about America. Smoke a cigarette


and masturbate. Ask your robotic assistant about installation options, today.

Sonnet for Flesh

Now he is mechanical.


and there ain't any music


on the a.m. dial, so you can


forget all about x-rock eighty


motherfucker, reconciling
yourself instead to

murmurs, utterances 
and the urge to catch

one's breath, 
trip trip tripingly, or whatever

else
 floats through the aether to be
 

transformed by magnetism.

Continuing his research on robots


because there are plenty of flash

videos 
that depict men made

from tin,
 he will limit and adjust

his range of motion, accordingly.

Quotations From a Revolution

Thirty years must pass said I,

knowing anyway springtime

could not be properly reckoned

in the rough calculation of

transit. You may visit when

it is convenient. Ah, but remember

to flee spasmodically with the night,

just when the trees flutter and

the birds erupt into their seasonal

songs of temporal location. Until

then, all monuments should be

built from locomotion; a reminder

of what we did to make an

escape from this new rain.

Sonnet for A Passing Vessel

Vast portions of the heavenly void

go unused because performing magic on

carpeted hallways has limitations. Things

are getting lost, and better yet, being revealed;

much like serpentine flashes in the trees,

almost like the time they found a poisonous spider

behind the water cooler. My dreams do not refer to literature.

They do not echo my father’s Quixotic asides.

Or describe everything as backwards. Inside that vessel,

Wave forms do not have emotional content and you

can experience purple in all of its glory, although

the soundtrack is forgettable; composed of bright pixels

that are really grains of rice that are really

bones colored like the contour of a cloud.

***

Rudolfo Carrillo is an artist and writer that lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He studied art at the University of New Mexico. He has been a welder and projectionist, but now works as a college instructor. His work has been published in all sorts of places, but mostly on the web and in newspapers. Interact with his site, Infinity Report, when you have  some time. 

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The New Mexican Astronauts

by Rudolfo Carrillo

Hey carnales, two-thousand and thirteen is pretty bitchin', so far, eh?

Everyone's talking about how far they have come along into the twenty-first century. It's just plain glorious to think about where we came from to get here. All that shiny newness reminds me of a fable I heard one day at Ghetto Smith's while wandering through the dog food aisle.

It's a story about the New Mexican astronauts; los recuerden? They came from the south with their sister the scientist in an attempt to reconcile el norte with la neta, if such a thing is possible.

I imagine there is all sorts of stuff on the interwebz about all this. Maybe you ought to google it when you are done here. Anywho, this story is about the time those two, nursed on atomic infusions and the dull knife of continuously magic circumstances, were gifted with petroleum-powered caballos mecánicos.

La historia suena así.

The dirt bikes were a good idea because they introduced a format for exploration that was dangerous and therefore had to be studied, modeled, processed, and then undertaken with the utmost gravity.

Additionally, there would be no supervision or support on actual missions, just the endless sage, wrecked cars, spiders, and occasional cows encountered on trails that had been carved out by the agents of men who had been making movies about an imaginary version of Albuquerque, who wanted a way to conveniently strand their hero in the Sandia Mountains, near the end of the fifth reel, like he was el vaquero más solitario del mundo, or something like that.

One of the motorcycles was painted green; the other was red. This configuration had nothing to do with the mythos of the popular culture in those parts regarding two fruitful colors; in this case let us say that the patterns and spectral traces differentiating one vehicle from the other symbolized springtime and blood.

The devices were put to use, a process concerned with the depiction of new experience was inititated and lonesome guitar songs played over the top of things as a plain reflection of the awesome and empty mesa that folded outward from the main observation laboratory. The two New Mexican astronauts prepared a mixture of gasoline and oil, imagining the far shore as just over the looming mountains, a bright thing seen vaguely from the corner of one's eye, waiting to be fully observed and made real.

And so with their sparkly protective headgear properly applied, the two New Mexican astronauts zoomed through several very compact iterations of the eleventh dimension which were craftily disguised as this or that neighbor's back yard, and right out into the middle the desert.

En ese desierto, algunos de los cactus estaban brotando plumaje colorido, and birds made from stones and mud lept up into the air as the spacemen approached. Here was a shift in the sand where a serpent had slithered by; there was a beverage storage unit abandoned long ago by another explorer, whose size was determined to be in excess of three meters, and therefore probably from one of the moons of Jupiter.

The only problem was that the whole scene lacked music. The two New Mexican astronauts fiddled with the idea of strapping a portable radio-wave receiver to one of the dirtbikes but decided it wouldn't be the same because meaningful tuneage would just get lost out there in the vasty arroyos, sabes?

On the journey back, one of the spacemen, the one with the name like a wolf (the other was called after the highest of clouds) ran over a small rodent. Basta, each cried out to the other. They hauled ass back to their space chante, parked los motorcicletas in a dark room filled with ghosts and spent the intervening days listening to A Night at the Opera and Goodbye Yellow Brick Road; smoking Salem brand cigarettes stolen from the captain's quarters.

At night they would take out their microscopes and consult encyclopedias while the wind churned and rattled as if telegraphed from a much heavier planet. The New Mexican astronauts retreated into their labyrinthine headquarters and shortly after the solstice, the dirt bikes became small birds that flew off towards the sea.

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Your Protagonist's Brief Reverie at Winrock

By Rudolfo Carrillo

"From the outset, let us bring you news of your protagonist."

On the way to Winrock Mall to ransack the bargain racks in the men's building — because they have two buildings at the Dillard's in Burque, one for the men and one for the women — your protagonist cranked up the car stereo and listened to 94 Rock while his wife sang along to the blare of the overly familiar pop-heavy metal songs being offered by a part-time DJ on a sunny Sunday afternoon.

As the non-exiting freeway overpass on Pennsylvania was surmounted and conquered by the ramshackle and mostly reliable Saab 900 Turbo, the ramshackle and mostly abandoned shopping center initially mentioned in this post loomed in the short distance and a song by Ozzy Osborne called Changes drifted with ironical peacefulness (given the singer's oeuvre) through the speakers, briefly causing the driver of the twenty-year-old silvery-gray sports car from northern Europe to lament the death of his dog, whose permanent absence from the earthly realm had coincidentally banished summer from the man's world, because here it was already near the middle of September and he was already shopping for woolen sweaters and hardy shoes and could not remember a goddamn thing that really happened between the beginning of May and the end of August, except for a couple of dreams.

In one of the dreams, your protagonist's dog was happy, living amongst the other grateful doggie dead, while David Foster Wallace oversaw the whole operation and repeatedly enjoined the dreamer to shorten his sentences and to choose his adverbs wisely.

In the other dream, it was already snowing and Burque was still part of Mexico. That was obvious from the shapes of the streets and sidewalks and buildings; the age of the concrete suggested Cortés and Moctezuma mixed up in equal proportions.

But, anyway, at the mall, most of that tragic stuff, those snowy aftermaths was and were sublimated by the totally amazing sale on men's shirts available for consumption by the general public and especially those seeking drastic reductions with just a hint of aging hipster fashion sense thrown in for good measure.

One of the salesmen wore a striped bowtie knotted in the traditional manner, imperfect and just madly droopy on the left side. Everybody with a nametag wanted to help out; can I help you find something in your size or are you ready to check out, they all said with pearly smiles.

On the way outta there, two French pullovers and one worsted wool set of trousers later, our protagonist and his lovely, brilliant, life-saving and totally the only person in the world even remotely capable of dealing with the sky-larking, Swiss cheese-brained, mournfully snarky and heroically underachieving alien-hybird that is, in essence, your protagonist, zipped along the perimeter of the once glorious Winrock Mall. Some construction company or other was tearing parts of the old place into shreds, carting portions of the lonesome asphalt parking lot over to huge rubbish bins. Only three of the ancient, nineteen-sixties Native American-art influenced parking lot signs remained standing: the one for clouds, the second for comets, and the third for rain.

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