…the universe is a big place, where improbable things happen all the time. Look at you.
– John Matson
At its deepest core
Reality is mere chance
A riot of bubbles boiling
And bursting, all unguessed
Unless the ever disappearing
Always borning bodies flung
Into pointless being, seething
In the cosmic whistling teakettle
Unless by the grace of improbability
By statistical nethering whimsy
By the merest intractable stroke
Of lunacy
We come back for the next moment
Again
And
Again
I went down to the beach in sworls
Longing for sun-bound benediction,
The binding waves’ delight
I went down to the beach in fancy,
The souls of a billion stars
Shone in the sand-blown wind
I went down to the beach in breathless,
Red-green ancient charts
New sprung each forgotten day
I lost my footprints
Without a glance
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.
Somehow, a mitochondrion wormed its way
Into our native beast, and, having found shelter,
Settled in.
We have twisted it to our liking,
Harvesting its life energy,
Binding it to ourselves
Like an indentured child
Harvesting the boundless sunlight
For a wizened mole.
Those walls have long since dissolved,
But part of us still seeks
The primitive new,
The strange echo of mutation,
The protean coil,
That entwines alien virtues.
But for every meld there is a sever,
How can I embrace you
If we have become one?
And for every sever there is a mending.
And so we spin and part our helix
Until end becomes beginning.
If all is one,
Why do I torture myself
With Illusion?
If a child’s scream
Sears my heart
More than a mountain stream,
If the despair of love
Kills me more
Than the promise of Spring,
What good is redemption?
If the longing
Endlessly lingers
If the forlorn
Beg for my embrace
What use are tears?
Is there a kind of one
That means many?
Or an illusion
That means now?
How curious
That from boundless unity
I have built heaven and hell.
exiles child 