'I Breathe The Air Of Other Planets' Poem by Daniel Brick

from Expectation by Stefan George,
set to music by Arnold Schoenberg
in his String Quartet No.2

The first planet I visited
was recommended by a traveler
I trusted. When I emerged
into its lime green air, all
was well for a moment. Then
my eyes burned as a sudden
wind poked them like stilettos.
I stumbled back to my spaceship,
set the controls on auto-pilot
for my next recommended landing.
There my ship was wracked
by fierce winds, and wind-stones
assaulted the whole vessel...
I realized previous journeyers
protected their claims by sending
us later journeyers to destructive
destinations. So I sought out
a humble, seemingly inferior planet,
and rested for two days and nights
before venturing out.

My first breath was a gentle medley
of cinnamon and nutmeg. I released
all the seals and let this blessed
air circulate throughout my ship.
This alien but known air filled
every bend and corner of it,
just as it filled my lungs and veins.
Outside in the perfumed air,
I made no effort to walk, I fairly
floated over the pure white surface
some distance from my ship, but already
that vessel from earth was the alien place.
Breathing this air was as natural as
breathing oxygen - had been! I felt
no need to rush or to tarry, no need to worry
or to rejoice. Everything was balanced just so.
I realized now why the older journeyers had
lied: it was to preserve a paradise...
for the few. How churlish! How understandable.

On the fifth day, my thinking cleared, my own
thoughts were free and untrammeled, just like
my sweet breathing hour after hour. Then
on the seventh day, after a night of dreams of crashing
space ships, poisonous clouds enveloping planets,
and men contorted by fear, I trudged across
a wide plain of shining white surface. I felt
my reptilian brain, dormant for so many eons,
open wide, with fold after fold, unwinding
in an alien cognition of alternating calm
and crisis, of over-confidence followed by fear.
At times my thoughts were a heavy exhilaration,
then plummeted to depths of anxiety. I slowed
to a crawl, then curled in a circle, and fell
into a dull sleep. I dreamed of flight. When awake,
I was cleansed by my remembrance of the ancient
dinosaurs, huge reptiles killed by breathing
fetid air, except for those that surrendered
scales for feathers, took flight and survived
as birds. It was the awakening of my mammalian
brain, my consciousness was human again. I rose,
thoughts tumbling and revolving, solutions to
problem after problem swiftly changing my state
of being. Had I already become the fabled Overman
after breathing this alien air for one week?

I was inflated with a new consciousness.
Was I not a New Being, expanding exponentially
as my New Home steadily transformed me? My ship
was lost somewhere far behind the thoughts
that had replaced memories and worries,
those commonplace obstacles of free thinking.
MY mind occupied a vast space within, content
to be fixed in its immense scope of cogitation.
How much time passed in this condition of being?
I existed at the center of an immense brain,
no longer reptilian plus mammalian plus human.
Had I not reached a yet higher sphere? Was it
the angelic brain through which thoughts flew,
creating vast inner structures of meaning,
dwarfing the architecture of earthly civilization.
I occupied cathedrals of the mind, soaring, almost flying...

Then in a moment out of time, but still somehow
a timely moment, I saw an orb of light moving
with startling speed toward me. It grew brighter,
and then even brighter. Within the orb I could see
a creature like myself. The telepathy began and
seemed to have lasted eons already. And then
I was enveloped, as if I had been swallowed
by a spiritual fire, which did not burn me,
but cleansed me and my human mind was was opened.
I was existent in a consciousness either very big
or very small. Dimensions no longer mattered.
A distant sun was growing larger, as we approached it
or it approached us. And my mind was filled with one thought:
HOMECOMING....