[In response to the 13^th Finding Everyday Inspiration https://dailypost.wordpress.com/blogging-university/writing-everyday-inspiration/ prompt on the question of word count, I submit a very old poem of mine, originally written semi-consciously whilst in the simultaneous throes of a white-rum binging session and yet another personal crisis, back in 1996, shortly after my arrival in Brazil. When I looked back at this prose-poem, scrawled on already yellowing paper, some years later, I noted something quite extraordinary. Despite the state of extreme inebriation in which it was originally composed, it exhibits a peculiar mathematical precision: containing 80 words, organized into three blocks of exactly 26 around the twice repeated word “tower,” which appears first at the beginning and then at the end of a two-part compound noun. The poem was originally somewhat pretentiously entitled Towards a Science of Desire (I was into a lot of crazy psychoanalytical stuff at the time). I have since retitled it Descent.]

Descent

Seeing a plane coming in to land, as if drowning in the earth’s lower atmosphere, sinking in smooth trajectory, down among the coral of the city’s tower-blocks; and thinking of the sweet precision of this maneuver, the exquisite balance between gravity and friction, the terse, direct, effective communication between pilot and control-tower; I imagine the sheer, exhilarating beauty of a science that allows a man to fall efficiently exactly where he wants to and should be. In place.