Banana Palace

I want you to know how it felt to hold it, deep in the well of my eye. You, future person: star of one of my complicated dooms — This one’s called Back to the Dark. Scene 1: Death stampedes through the server-cities. Somehow we all end up living in caves, foraging in civic ruin. Banana Palace— the last of the last of my kind who can read breathes it hot into your doom-rimed ear. She’s a dowser of spine-broken books and loose paper the rest of your famishing band thinks mad. • Mine was the era of spending your time in town squares made out of air. You invented a face and moved it around, visited briefly with other faces. Thus we streamed down lit screens sharing pictures of animals looking ridiculous — trading portals to shoes, love, songs, news, somebody’s latest rabid cause: bosses, gluten, bacon, God — Information about information was the pollen we deposited — while in the real fields bees starved. Into this noise sailed Banana Palace. • It was a mother ship of gold. Shining out between happy bday katie ! and a photo of someone’s broken toe — Like luminous pillows cocked on a hinge, like a house with a heavy lid, a round house of platelets and honey — It was open, like a box that holds a ring. And inside, where the ring would be: • I think about you a lot, future person. How you will need all the books that were ever read when the screens and wires go dumb. Whatever you haven’t used for kindling or bedding. Whatever made it through the fuckcluster of bombs we launched accidentally, at the end of the era of feeling like no one was doing a thing about our complicated dooms — Helpless and braced we sat in dark spaces submerged in pools of projected images, trying to disappear into light — Light! There was so much light! It was hard to sleep. • Anyway. Banana Palace. Even now when I say it, cymbals shiver out in spheres. It starts to turn its yellow gears and opens like a clam. Revealing a fetal curl on its temple floor, bagged and sleeping — a white cocoon under lit strings that stretch from floor to ceiling — a harp made of glass incubating a covered • pearl — We broke the world you’re living in, future person. Maybe that was always our end: to break the jungles to get at the sugar, leave behind a waste of cane — There came a time I couldn’t look at trees without feeling elegiac — as if nature were already over, if you know what I mean. It was the most glorious thing I had ever seen. Cross-section of a banana under a microscope the caption read. I hunched around my little screen sharing a fruit no one could eat.