Contingencies

--after Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno

All these penguins just chilling out

It’s so dark and all the ice is melting under our feet

The feet of the transcendental subject

Now that there is only horizon and inside and outside this drone

In my ear not even mine, but not yours either

What they are gathered for, the penguins

They love being together and warm each other

While another world ends, the world that is our only one

Machines talk to one another, adjust the thermostat

Inside this earth

A moon rises but it is not the moon after all,

Nor is it the sun either, this light source

But a suddenness of places we can’t gather

Far away the birds dream a fog machine in Central Park

The anti-moonlight of their minds eye teleporting damp

Light sources that are only lights, glissando lights

Dry ice communicated between objects

As if just any moon could rise.

*

The wall moves without you

But this isn’t so strange,

And the lights flicker and go out

But this isn’t so strange,

And the posters on the wall glow in the dark

But this isn’t so strange,

And there are robots which

Reproduce Marilyn Monroe’s

Handwriting on hotel stationary,

But this isn’t so strange either

And it isn’t so strange that the sound

Of a dog rustling in the grass

Or of insects buzzing is amplified,

Or that an anime character is speaking to me

And that she has a live body double

Played by a teenage girl,

Nor that a balloon rises over the houses

And looks like a moon at this scale,

Nor that the room can contain a microclimate

Or that penguins gather around a light source,

Or that a piano plays by itself while an

Ash-like substance falls to it

Dusting its lacquered surfaces—no

What is strange is that we are here at all

And that your face is lit-up suddenly

In a building that seems like a ruin but

Has recently been renovated,

And this feeling of having lost you

While we wait for the orgy scene

And that the cops have to break up the marching

Band as they play “Hava Nagila” in tandem with

A-ha’s “Take on Me,” the crowd booing the police

As we queue up outside the Centre Pompidou,

And that your Paris apartment is so similar to

Your New York apartment, and that one would

Eat a plank of cheeses for dessert.

*

And then we realize that we were the aliens

And then we realize that we are the monsters

And we never did understand why they created us

And we never will understand why they want to destroy us

And so it must be something that we didn’t know we did

How would we ever even know the intentions of an alien?

If a machine could talk what would it say

I don’t think these pianos are playing for us

I’m pretty sure this wall wouldn’t care if it crushed us

When we lose our faith in Marilyn we have lost our faith of humanity

Listening to the world like I was Christopher Knowles

They were building an arsenal against their only world

They were tracking a message because they didn’t know who sent it