I dreamt Barriss Mills was Ogden Nash…
Oh, so round and hard to please
Rather like enormous peas
Big leathery living flaps
Curled about like sailors’ caps
Neither dry nor fully wet,
And green, so very green, and yet,
Despite the sheerness of their mass
Who knew inside was so much gas?
What parts of me lie buried in unstoned ground
Dreams and fears alike leached out
Into the indifferent clay?
What parts of what I am pleased to call
My own invention come down
Through the ancient crossfire of nature and nurture
To the ultimate epi-me,
Striding vainly along memory’s boulevards
Grasping at the heart of things?
Isn’t that, too, some determinate of blood and soil?
Of circumstance stenciled onto a genetic landscape,
Long fixed, long before I thought to uncover it?
Go back far enough, and we are all progeny
Of blind, pointless chemical replication,
Some accident of electromechanical impulse
Upon a sludge.
In that space between waking and sleeping
In the subtle slip, the drip
That turns the period into the comma,
In the hole in the zero
Whole worlds explode into being
The point between breathing
In and out
The curl of before and after
The warp and weft of here and now
Open the infinite wide
You say you know something
Of life and illusion
Please tell me how
Such emptiness
begets all eternity
exiles child 