Tag: experimental

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The Mind is the Matrix of All Matter

In the sky we saw the deal we’d been looking for

since the year Max Planck died and then a couple more:

only 19.99 to buy into this divinity.

Own a share of your symbolic God and Oh ! God !

Stock splits, quick, add that s to symbolism, bless the spirits,

split your losses, mend your atoms, hold black bodies to your chest

and build them shelters in this storm, and plank yourself in whatever constants

you can afford.

 

Imagine that shift in frequency –

the ring of freezing lightbulb walls spitting up the harshest light

as your infant spiritual singularity glows a little less bright.

 

Gods are what you make of them, the sky now said,

so quantize the planes above and bathe in this 19.99 rite.

I’m sold.

 

I now own one trillionth of the first recorded prayer:

               on the absolute reality and its planes,

               on that finest spiritual light,

               we meditate, as remover of obstacles,

               this is what enlightenment feels like.

 

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To Write Poetry Is To Be Distracted      

 

         Let us set the scene,

his shallow voice announces;

 

hands inching though conductor’s motions,

humid air seeping through the gaps between his knuckles,

he tries to our catch our fluttering minds like a child catching fireflies.

 

The stump on which he stands may as well be fifteen years away—

time is of no concern to us

on this late spring day;

 

we have come to write,

to be distracted in the sun by the

              stuff of poets.

 

We are the people who find beauty

in a grain of rice lying on a mottled grey table;

it is the color of a long-awaited peace.

Its muted glow gives rise to thoughts of a

sun-drenched undersea scene.

And the magnitude of the lightly rugged tabletop

speaks to the human condition of infinity.

Naïvely, by attrition.

But aren’t we beautiful?

 

               Let us set the scene,

his shallow voice repeats;

 

and we still don’t catch the words,

his intonations drowned out

by the sounds of our surroundings.

 

How can we listen to the product of poetry,

faced with the lushness around us?

 

This,

         we know,

our writing shows,

         this

         is the stuff of poetry.

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FEAR

Mothers watch with weary, wary, tired eyes

from doorways and corners on every continent of this godforsaken world.

 

Stepping on cracks did, in fact, break their backs

but they bite their withered tongues and train their skin to shield the pain.

 

They watch their children

and the men they’ve become,

 

and they see girls weathering their withering tongues:

training them to speak in rhymes and riddles

and to speak no ill,

 

and they see girls growing thick their skins

ridding them of the ghosts of hairy hands

and men hunting them for the thrill.

 

The daughters get buried alive

in guilt and unheard rage and the weight of blood-ripped skin.

 

This pain wears and wars their tired eyes,

and as mothers of unwanted kin they cloak their eyes in shadow,

backs breaking from within.

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Learning to Lose

You lose yourself between the empty ticking of the clock,

The low-brow knock of tick-tack-tock;

The wayward, strident second hand

Beats to the sound of unmanned wreckage

Inside the holy-water of your heart.

 

You lose yourself between the leaves of sheaves of books,

The smell of well-felled plant-cells planted in antiquity

Permeates the dusty shelves,

And only time will tell whether

They will find a home again.  

 

You lose yourself in stacks of stones and tomes and poetry,

A clustered, flustered, flotsam-jetsam meld

Of stories bound together by the past;

Held in ship-shape place for

Longer than history itself.

 

You lose yourself under night’s weighty deep-dark cape,

Walking the fleeting distance from one bright-bite

Pinprick of light in the sky to another;

Wondering under what thundering sky

You yourself will join them.

 

You lose sight of yourself, you begin to notice, in the meaningless

Of hypocrisy, and the view of infinity from your bedroom window.

So while pre-processed thoughts and lacklustre words

Pour from the jaws of immobile, ignoble people,

 

You lose yourself again in the empty ticking of the clock,

And learn to love its simple sound.