Of course, I mutter back at him. This is perfectly natural. We're mutants, you and I. Some people never look past the page. As I say this, or think this (I'm not sure which; Jason's voices dilate, brim the terrace, the Venusian night, with jagged corners, dense inscribed edges. I feel as if I'm trapped in a whirling, moving Kandinsky; a Kandinsky rotating upside-down, rightside up, all in time with my own breath, my own minute motion), more Jason-text slides over our bodies, warm, enveloping: "Abandon it there jealous/against the corpulent bed of your thumb." None of this phases Jason. He's still leaning back in his deck chair, elegantly swan-stemmed glass of merlot cradled in his hands. "Sometimes, after nights of drinking with friends in local bars, you come home at three or four in the morning and stumble into the bathroom. After a long release of fluids, and the sound of a night’s hard work being flushed away, you look in the mirror." As he speaks, he stretches back to take in the sky; somewhere out there, both of us know, is that beautiful blue ball we call Earth. He seems to speak from a certain homesickness. "At first the disheveled interloper in the metal backed glass is someone you don’t know. You douse your face with water, try washing the bar stamps off your hand, and look up again. Still the head and nose and eyes appear strange wobbling back at you with their curious stare. You strain to recognize the person. You clean the glass with a mildewing towel from the floor and still struggle to befriend this other invading your space."
"Perhaps that is the way I feel as a hypermedia poet. After the intoxicating experience of creating hypermedia works, I am bewildered by my artistic reflection. Am I, as you ask, a painter? A poet? A sound manipulator? A multimedia tinkerer?"
"Hell if I know." And both of us laugh, straining at last from our chairs on this interstellar roof in search of more wine.
--to be continued December 21st, here at the Suite--
