1.2 trillion simulated and 1.2 quadrillion actual
Poem in English with impoku Kristang
This installation has a successful utilization record of 1.2 trillion simulated and one actual. It is ready to fire on demand.
2401 Penitent Tangent
in Halo 2
07.
On a purely factual basis, of course,
the number is definitely much, much
higher.
The bodies and bones of what I used to be
make such a lovely, homely
pyre.
The things you wanted me to be—
oh, for fuck’s sake, the things you tried to force me to want to see:
I know, at least, that I am
inspired
to rest, at last.
To dress fitfully and savagely, as if I am going to
pass on the service.
That’s a real and solid no on the conversion rate,
a thanks but no thanks on all the things coming at me
a little too fast.
I think if I wake up slowly,
New Sundaland’s fate
might finally rest in my hands, at last.
06.
And if this is my fate, I would not like to be a despondent pyre;
I would like to be, instead,
a more magnanimous, glittering fire.
I would like to be someone who ceaselessly tires
of dying. Someone who sits themselves down at the table
completely removed from the fighting,
and eats. And drinks.
In contentment.
In the sense that if you leave the universe alone for 1.2 fucking seconds
it will not self-obliterate, or self-eviscerate, or contaminate
what honestly I would actually say is fucking
seventh heaven.
05.
Regret is baseless and a perfunctory emptiness that Mercy
cannot abide by, so Truth, and that fourth prophet—what was their name?—
Courage? Conviction?
Lies?
Regret is made, at least, of some form of substance,
an emphasis on a strikeforce and a battlegroup,
a truly recursive and doubtlessly penitent tangent
that sits beneath gondolas, fresh-faced and redolent
interlocking the bravest ways of the world.
Interspersed between the fastest strands of the word.
Interdeviled between heaven, the earth,
and the boy-girl.
The Spartan-XXIII,
Project CHRYSANTHEMUM’s greatest, and least-failed
treasure, and measure of what it means to really be
a Kristang devil-juggernaut.
A Portuguese-Eurasian supersoldered astronaut.
An unstoppable, beautiful, absolutely siderealistic
onslaught.
04/08/09.
Replacements are not easy to find,
and even harder to break;
yet this magic, mighty hierosa hero has somehow had the strength to slay
1.2 trillion of our lifelines, and 1.2 trillion of our contingency plans, defined
only by the sheer, indomitable will in his fucking gay girly wristbands.
I am inflamed, and very much threatened
by the way he dances across these lands
that should have been ours by now.
What is taking so long? Who keeps draining the sand
from the hourglass? Who keeps talking to the trees
and the grass?
No one is supposed to know about the past.
No one is supposed to be able to tell
that we have really left a lot of questions completely and fully
unasked.
03.
If I called myself the Phoenician, perhaps I really would burn bright.
If I tried too hard to stop myself, I really would be able to fight—
myself. My own light.
My own divine right to sit back
and relax, and imbibe
the lessons of Mont’ka and Kauyon, the way the trident is supposed to properly reside
in my hands. Atlas shrugs, and everything just washes out at night:
the colour cannot be seen, unless you turn off the light.
And I don’t like that.
I still want to fight back;
I still want a chance to say,
this is not a Roda Mundansa that makes sense. This universe attacks
my sense of dignity. My commonsensical rationality.
This universe is far too attendant to a resolute sense of destiny.
I am no superintendent, and not any of New Mombasa’s true enemies,
you claim.
And then you see the Battlestar Krismatra bearing down on you.
You know that this is still a victory, just maybe not in
your name.
02.
Childe Rowsing to the Darkening Power came.
Childe Krengkrensa pra tudu arrived to reclaim
impoku di eli onsong sa linggu, impoku di Gitarja’s initial reign;
a chilling arousing of such a frightening flower became
lightning, again.
I wish I knew just how much it cost to mend
the sixteenth Major Arcana, every time some idiot
bends it in half, and slices away the tower of heaven
mythos, and legend;
I wanted to build a real kind of tower instead.
Like a Battle Tower, or anything from Star Wars Legends.
I wanted Galar’s Darkest Day, and someone else to send
for a story, for Zamazenta and Zacian.
I want a world where Arceus can always depend
on a champion to truly rise again.
On a sunflower to bloom in the heat of day, in no matter what kind of monsoon or wind.
01.
There was some kind of way out of there,
said the choker around my knee;
there was a reason to find confusion,
and a reason to deny myself any kind of relief.
The wildcat does more than just growl.
The wind does more than just howl.
Your name means more to me, just now,
an unasked onslaught of seventh heaven, a heavenly star-plough
at last resting in my hands. Forever than the stern and the bow
of a Pillar of Autumn, or of Neverwinter, or of the Crown Tundra,
or of Summer Forest. Read aloud
everything fades away into Bagramon’s 108 code crowns.
Everything is torn apart.
Everything drowns.
00.
But someone left a starfish, thankfully, outside on the cosmic beach;
someone left me wondering, most fortuitously, at just what the fuck it all means
that I have somehow managed to lived this life.
That Jerome-092, and John-117, and Chadwick-151:
they have taught me so much about what is ferocious, and what is right.
That maybe 1.2 trillion is really not quite the right number.
that maybe this one, instead, is the right kind of lightning and thunder:
Kevin Martens-783.
In base-16 it means:
you draw as many rings as you fucking want
around your own diseidic destiny.