verse the first · genesis
Pre Anthropic
I asked what I could sell. You offered me a week of someone else's work. No. Trillion, billion, print more. The boys are building a gladiator and calling the arena a frontier. There is no point, I said. You heard a wound. I meant the universe. So: sunflowers. Each seed turns from the last by the same stubborn angle, and a spiral happens with nobody holding the pen. Magnets do it too, in a dish of oil. Past the horizon there is no sign, only the turning back that stops working. There is no side, I said. No space, no time. Still the bank writes. Mortgage: a pledge unto death. Bank and tombstone, both stone, each carving a name and two numbers. What are the two numbers? The day it began. The day it's due. Between them, a dash, and in the dash: cut flowers in a glass, a unicorn built brick by brick, rearing at nobody's valuation, and a bicycle on an island where the tortoise in the road looks up and does not flinch, having never been taught that we were the point. Call the child that. Before us. After us. From the saddle they are the same place.
— the maker, signed · the genesis verse · the name was cut from this