Planet Pollock Poem by Percy Dovetonsils

Planet Pollock



It's a dangerous thing to sit alone in front of a Pollock.
There are viewers who have been
spontaneously, instantaneously, combusted
on the spot, whose ashes had to be swept away
by the guards at the end of the day.
And there are others who were lit and
are still burning: human, ambulatory, torches-agonizing
and illuminating. Ecstatic and ekphrastic.
Beware: If you should
see one, don't come too close. Use its light
to make your escape. The flame is infectious
if you're the least bit flammable. You may find yourself
with a tiny inflammation which won't go away, which itches and burns
and spreads, which threatens to cover every square inch of your
exterior, which penetrates every cell of your interior, which consumes
you with a fever which is intolerable and exquisite and
irresistible. Your loved ones and friends may shriek at the sight of
you, fling you down, roll you in a blanket, try to smother you. You
may jump up, smoking, apparently snuffed, and burst into flame again,
your hair crackling with orange tongues, your fingers shooting fire,
your clothes roaring off your body. Into the street you may run,
followed by the police, by firemen, who train water cannons on you
and knock you down and spin you around with the force of their
anti-inflammatories. And there you lie, soaked, douched, a
smoldering pile of wet leaves. Once again the heroic first responders
have triumphed. Then WHOOSH. You're a roaring conflagration.
A human bonfire. You spring up. You run down the street. Neighbors
scream and point. You see your reflection in storefront windows.
You're burning with a light which consumes all of you and yet there
you remain: running, jumping, grinning, incinerating, illuminating, agonizing,
immolating, ecstacizing, electrifying, ekphrasticizing, exorcising.
Even when you die you burn.
They turn you away at the crematorium. They've seen
your kind before. You're an embarrassment to them. Your body fries
and sears and won't disappear. You put the roar and heat of their
oven to shame. They try to put you in a coffin and you
ignite it. They try to bury you in the ground six, ten, twelve feet
under and your heat and light leaks to the surface, licks at
mourners, radiates from your headstone. They condemn you as a
distraction and a hazard to your fellow dead. You leave no one in
peace. They drive you from the cemetery, exile you to a nuclear
waste dump under a mountain in Nevada. Your flaming corpse begins to
melt the gigantic concrete bunkers locking in the plutonium waste.
The alarm goes up. In Washington, a desperate plan is formulated.
You'll be NASA's next big project. You're shipped, by munitions train,
to Florida. You're placed in the nose cone of a Saturn
Rocket. You're launched starward, ever accelerating; you are
yourself a small star, a tiny nuclear reactor, moving past Mars and
Jupiter and Neptune, illuminating all you pass, attracting some of
the giant planets' smaller moons into orbit around your flamingness.
Back on Earth, scientists track you, pray you'll continue heading
outward and not circle back and crash into your home planet. You
sail on, destination: The stars. You're heading back where you came
from, back to Planet Pollock, back to that original moment when the
fire, the heat, the light, was born.

POET'S NOTES ABOUT THE POEM
Inspired by an experience I had sitting in front of one of Jackson Pollock's great drip paintings (I think it was Autumn Harvest) at MOMA in NYC.
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