14th December 2013. China's lunar shuttle has landed on the moon.
Name: Change-E 3 after the woman some believe lives there, the one
I told you about first time you asked me to tell you a Chinese legend.
When all I could recall was something about a rabbit, some potion,
someone else's medication, a very bad goddess/woman who had stolen
from her husband and floated up into space. You said it sounded
like the myth of the Garden of Eden in reverse. That whole thing
about forbidden fruit and banishment, a female body suspended between
the sky and the Earth. Our own bodies were intertwined on my parents'
couch, clothes in a pile at our feet, chemicals on our tongues
about to take hold, the moon rabbit woman thing sounding
so random you didn't believe I didn't just make up that story.
The first time we tripped you asked me what I believed in.
Caught off-guard, I stammered um, Jesus, and you said,
for some reason I had assumed you were Buddhist.
I had assumed you were the kind of person who wouldn't assume that.
Somewhere at some point in a hotel room far away, Janis Joplin is giving head
to some famous guitar-playing poet and he will go write a song about it
that you will one day sing to me, admitting he didn't feel all that much
for her, but I hear she didn't think he was all that great either, just thought
maybe one night might give her a bit more insight into his power and mythology.
Someone once said that together, we looked like Lucy Liu and Mick Jagger.
I was pissed off. I'd always wanted to be mistaken for a Rolling Stone:
I believed white boys had always had the market cornered on immortality.
All I meant was I liked the way you moved your hips onstage, thought maybe
talking to you might help me decipher the rhythm, but then you had to go write
a whole space opera about it, put me in a skintight silver cat suit, hair down to my
knees.
Somewhere I am telling you the story about a friend's sham wedding and you
don't believe that that's a not story I just made up in my head when I tell you
if we got married, the Border Agency would presume it was only for the citizenship.
And I will try and forgive you when you say I am the one who doesn't get it
because we know you've lived more years on this little island than me
because now I am the one dripping hysterical tears onto your chest.
I never wanted to marry you, I just wanted your secret formula
for immortality. And somewhere in a room far from here, you are giving
me head on your unmade bed and I am trying to figure out how much
I'm actually enjoying it, wondering if this ever gave you any insight
into my poetry and some say Chang-Er would have been nothing
without her man who saved the world from nine suns burning
to win his own personal stash of eternity, and you always said
Janis Joplin would still be around if she got into acid instead of
dope and whiskey. And I tended to agree with most things you said
maybe the truth is everyone has different definitions of immortality.
Somewhere there is a one-way plane ticket to Singapore on my table.
You see it as life sentence. I see it as you never telling me what to do again.
Somewhere she's jumping from her window ledge, knows
that she's been seen. Somewhere they find her body slumped
over in a corner, coroners' report will state no sign of trauma.
She's taken too much of her lover's medication, she's falling
up into a sea of black holes and unnamed constellations,
blowing kisses at a disgraced Eve freefalling towards Earth,
meeting her halfway, she whispers, things could always be worse.
14th of December 2013. China's lunar shuttle lands on the moon.
Name: Change-E 3 for the woman some believe lives there,
and now a lunar rover called the Jade Rabbit is there too,
so maybe you will believe that story I told you about the rabbit
and the woman orbiting the Earth: you couldn't just make this up.
