When he gets Geena Davis into his laboratory,
she winds up taking off a black silk stocking.
A reporter, there for the story, she rolls the
stocking down her thigh then knee then calf,
as if the mixing of business and pleasure goes
with the territory. Something she knows about.
She steps out of her stocking. Hands it to him,
smiling. And he dissolves and rematerializes it.
White people shouldn’t mix with black silk stockings,
or mix them with science. They can’t handle it. Cut
to her taking the story to her editor who calls Jeff
Goldblum/Seth Brundle a con man. A magician.
Cut to the lab: a baboon in a telepod, the animal
zapped to become—yuk!—a squirming mass.
Red-goo monkey steak but alive and in pain.
Seth then pontificates about the poetry of flesh.
He says the computer translates or mistranslates
what it supposes flesh to be. Says the problem
is the computer can only repeat an impression
of a baboon. Which is his and isn’t even close.
No understanding of poetry yields no monkey
reassembled in approximately correct fashion.
They kiss—she kisses him—they fall together.
After a breakthrough revelation about the body,
a next baboon bounds out intact. Monkey see,
monkey do: Seth goes next, the stowaway fly
on the window of the teleporter his undoing.
What is science if not poetry translated? Of
course the experiment turns to shit. (It’s love,
why wouldn’t it?) Seth starts to crave sugar
and fuck like Superman on steroids. Lectures
about wanting to really penetrate the flesh.
He’s buzzing now. To think, it all started
with the best intentions. And love, which
we hope will absolve us of everything.