Eno's THE SHIP

by  shaun lawton 

As The Ship began streaming from my PC speakers the first thing I thought of was glass. A filament beneath fogged glass. A filament beneath fogged glass lighting up slowly. The light going from warm yellow toward white and then blending through the spectrum. The glass clarifies then liquefies then disappears altogether, leaving just the light to wallow in the vacuum. Pin pricks allow echoes to flower in the darkness. Deep below decks an engine switches on, muffled by steam engines behind sound proofed glass. The lights dance through the bricks of green glass slowly as more sounds come alive.  A symphony wakes up from its coma to gradually stretch out and yawn. The Ship was sprung from a willing land. Echoes of gaseous vapors steam off the surface of a crystal sea. And there's a globe of powdered sand. We live in clothes we wore. Air bubbles elongate as they plummet and drown. The Time is still. The Sky is young. Drawn on towards the gulf of stars whispering. And we are as the undescribed. Reverberations coalesce into an uprising. A voice through a vibraphone speaks. Distant percussion keeps time. My desert in a grain of sand. My life within a day. So stew the storms that some tied. The black plague is sitting. But we are as the undefined. Reeking of the wind. Whispers begin emanating underneath the skin. Shimmering Cymbeline trapped beneath quiet ice. The sail is down the wind is gone. The sky is black with mold. A slave to hope and destiny. Illusion of control. And we are as the unrefined. The waves about us roll. Spearheaded echos of crystal arrowheads repeatedly diminish triggering smaller fishes of their reflections. Awash in ambient protocols diffused in all directions. Sonar tones arise and sink. Submersibles arrive guided by phosphorescent headlamps. Deeper we go while more voices grow, probing our innermost thoughts. Penetrating the sunken canyons in our little dreadnoughts. The spotlights search left and right, revealing all the whispers in bone. The water is more like marrow here. Our thoughts are all we own. Memories ping and rebound off the inner rubber of our skulls. The pressure stretches these interlocking seams. Even deeper we fall further into fissures transformed to trenches. Microorganisms streaming by our windshield. The vibrations of our tectonic crust. Submerged under wave after wave after wave after wave. The last gossip gradually drowns in our skulls as the final light arrives to wink completely out.