The Long Take: 5 Poems by Jeff T. Johnson

The Passage / The Thing

The passage runs under the complex & all that blank snow. The  spacecraft seems misplaced but so is the medical doctor whose only symptom was loss of mind. Douse it all & somehow make it out for the credits, to meet the missing Childs.

First we get to see the future. Where the dog came from. To deliver us there. The thing dawns on everybody, benighting us all. It ends, of course, in flames.

Does the dog bring the future back, or does the dog run to the present from a conditional past (the future) only to find the future on its way.

First the plants took over the planet, seeds cast from the skies, outgrowing all life, become the ecology, so humans could only tap them for sustenance. Their homes destroyed, the air thick with stalks, they must descend into the roots, infest in turn. The paper on which this text was printed came from these same organisms. They ate their way into the system.

The Passage / The Thing

What if we are looping on a projector without a wall, or we are thrown upon the heap of what was once a wall. We could be the passage from 1 thing to the next, each an inferior version. Maybe we are the thing that had to wait for the thing to remake itself. Ever a pastiche, cancerous entity & self sculpture. An enormous version of the will to see 1 self in others. We have no other viewpoint than our own even if there is no self. So that we are host parasite & vision of the other.

& what is the other side, film or residue, soundtrack a blur, 1 organism smearing into the scenery, everything made of color. Only the title to another version, also known as The Return or Back From Beyond.

You don’t know what’s in the wall even after you made sure there was no room under the bed. What you released into the air came from the soundtrack, or merged with it. As sound design becomes the setting. As unseen things are heard. As sounds are seen.

What is the world but these fibrous beings, these openings in foliage, livid matter issuing from decayed speakers. We’ve been here before in another form. We recognize ourselves in the leaves. Each trunk packed with seeds.

When they returned to Earth perhaps they refused to leave the vehicle. Or perhaps the door was stuck. Perhaps they jammed it themselves. Or they never came back. Is it possible the craft was always empty?

The Passage / The Thing

Not all horror movie children are white though the gentrifier vampires usually are. The money man is a familiar type. Movies tell people in movies how to behave, & how to beat the monster. Always do the right thing. The end?

In double features 1 passage leads to another & the illusion we decide what follows. So a broken child now 21, always failing to kill Laurie after first artfully dispensing with her friends, after which the boys still can’t stay off the moors even after another visit to the warning confines of the Slaughtered Lamb. It’s 1978, then it’s 1981, finally, & finally once more.

The station is a mess of passages downed beakers strewn flasks control panels pockets of quarters all open to the ocean except the windowless library which accounts for every lost theory of contact.

We come back this way ill sized, out of scale to memory, nor are our compatriots in their original positions, whether or not they appear as they are recalled.

The old form is still time, a landscape of memory, plaster vision of its own construction careering toward a dissolution too slow to be perceived in human scale & not slow at all to the vasty ocean that takes back the shore.

The Passage / The Thing

The many levels of ocean & ship run down the screen to take hold of the soundtrack which aside from a killer motif brings too much sunshine & the scent of future banal turns upon the sea, so that though we have moved through the boiled skulls of leviathans, we have barely descended before the surface, above us, roars.

It’s we that stalk the swimmers at the beach, prevaricating toward them in the goggled waters, perambulating into the vicinity of good naked people at the water’s waist.

To each monster its own approach, as they slide between receding teens. This 1 has artful pretensions, always setting a scene, while this other is all blunt force innovating every kill. We know them primarily by their motifs, haunting the edges of the aural frame, attending a silhouette or hand adjusting branch. We are in turn each monster, each boy or girl, each knife & axe. We cannot die.

The lake carved out of trees, which make a platform for diving in after a bad joke. Who knows what lies  under the surface, or walks the floor. Paths here abound, some splashed with blood from another episode. The light is an effect, like rain. & though the leaves look real enough, even the carefully worn sign authentic, it’s all seen through a hole in the wall. Over there, the other camera eye, the lesser 1 perhaps, more pointed finger really: look, & look, & look.

The Passage / The Thing

The passage is dark but doesn’t have to be. See there’s the switch, turn it on. Oh but it only gets darker. Try flipping it again.

Downstairs, a stone wall fronts another corridor, red glow beneath pickaxe swing. Still, it lit the ocular windows astride the nasal chute, & bathes the house at the outset, before the grey dawn fades.

The place name changes with time but the promise remains: find yourself. Inside, it’s all passage, reflecting back on us. We pursue the variations, forget to turn back when the mirrored wall disappears. So these surfaces were fronts, & a new set of passages reveals itself, leading to an escalator, down, to a hall. Behold the underworld that holds us up.

The basement is always a laboratory, a passage between past & future. We fear the absence between those aporetic states. Halls full of doors, or  no doors. Unfinished spaces, dark foundations. We’re not supposed to be here in the not-past, the un-future, the absent, the sunken place.