One sudden morning

One sudden morning, as the sun sprang gayly
Slung across the day
And the breeze teased the slithery waters
And crowned the trees with whispers
I slipped the irons of time.

The child grandfathered the world
Through my heart, and I saw the true meaning
Of love beyond mentioning, of life unsheathed.
I saw the fringe of being, the birthplace
Of torment and gain, hand in hand in hand.

Awash in that speck of reality
That illusion casts in the eye,
Was unbending everness, all in gale and garnet,
In anguish above and below
That which eludes the grasp.

A wisp of this and that,
And great epics are written
In groaning slabs of rock, in ecstatic wandering
Through surges of joy and despair
All identically kitted out.

Whether we arrive here or there
Means nothing, after all;
That was the secret that escapes always.

In the beginning was the word
And the word was not.

Epitaph

Row upon row,
Field upon field,
Rise these stelae.
Long and short,
One upon another,
Lovingly marked
As if to banish forgetfulness.

“Goodbye, fare well
On your long last journey.
We shall never forget you.
But just in case,
Here are your particulars.”

The birth of time

My last post may have seemed rather a dismal prospect, so I felt the need to perk things up a bit. Hence this prequel.

Suddenly, there was suddenly
Suddenly one thing could follow the last
A great thumping cosmos hummed itself
Into being, bits of light chased and clumped

Into riots of color. Suddenly,
There could be succession, a rhythm.
There could be change and season
And the songs the winter writes for summer.

Then came memory, and all the love and loathing
To fill it til it spilled bursting
Into spinning clinging helical again
What was became was

How could I not be born?

I strode along Boulevards of grace-rimmed
Wonder, green-eyed raspberry wet
Racing, lapping my feet, my soul
The color of sweet melting kisses.

A swirl of endless life/death enticed about me
How kind to have this path so under me!
How clear to have such rhyming intense otherness
Calling all about!

I have these charts, these vectors,
This swollen ark to take me sailing.
Here comes a grandfather wind
All a-swoon!

The poet who sang at the end of time

The bland design falls, outward bound.
The swilling beast groans with cheap ecstasy,
Sometimes interior,
Sometimes superior.

What is exterior obliterates me
Until my fragile image asserts its wee voice,
Lost in a chorus
Of wee voices.

I know, I know, I am the only me,
The only conjunction of these points,
But how could you have failed to guide me
Through this hidden path?

Was I supposed to intuit mere chance?

As it is, I’m left to glide along
Waste-bound avenues,
Street grime the color of storm clouds,
Tipping into a middling redemption

Unawares, using old navigation charts,
Useless azimuths, discarded distances,
Captain of a bottomless vessel,
An occidental sailor upon oriental shores.

See there, where no destination lies.
A simple ending, no beyond, no before.
Not even a reason for despairing.
We’d mistaken the moon for a song.

This herky-jerky journey

This herky-jerky journey between madness and content
In the slender strand of a lifetime,
This momentary fragment, when a step forward or back
Means obliteration, just kills me.
I mean I am a directionless wisp,
A whim of contingency.

I know, I know, it’s the speed, not the light,
It’s the memory, not the event, but still,
Can my consequence be detectable?
What is the worth of a single bubble, unique but common?
I have the same value as a single mote,
A quantum value.

I am the boson of this boat,
My captain has abdicated
In favor of probability.
What pops in also pops out,
What breeds continuity
Also bleeds continuity.

And yet, here we are, our helices entwined,
Our smear upon history irrevocable.
That shallow basin, barely discernible
– Just ignore it.
It’s your destiny.