Consider that colour is given to us
in plentitude
from games played by light &,
that the liquidity of water is
a feature of a particular performance
between specific particles
bonding with each other
& yet
no individual actor has
the property of ‘being wet’.
What does that mean to you?
If it means nothing,
congratulations:
you can thrive in this world, but
if you strove to find any semblance
of pattern
or symbol,
you’re fucked.
Poem
“It is not how the world is that is mystical, but that it is”*
Wet leaves swim in the breeze;
everything is as it is, yet
nothing is ever how it seems:
As green falls to greet deep substance,
far above the breathing trees,
birds oscillate through waves unseen;
insects teem, mammals dream
& Gaia abounds with
collective recollections echoing
through space & time.
Ceaseless interaction,
constant inconstancy & change;
the finitude that births infinity;
all that is beyond me, just as
there is an outer limit to all things,
beyond which others limits persist:
the world consists of what
does & does not exist.
* Ludwig Wittgenstein
Dignity
The Seagulls used to be Angels
according to a Nordic legend that
I probably don't understand.
They have become this way, it seems,
because we simply,
slowly
forgot about them.
& as I stand outside in the warm night
smoking,
I can hear them squawking
a seething, teeming mass of white feathers
& cold hard beaks poking at discarded
styrofoam chip boxes,
ketchup packets
& chicken bones:
all the detritus out here by the coast
in one of so many forgotten towns…
The thought that these
strangely mechanical seeming
beasts could once have been
our sublime idols seems oddly appropriate:
Now that we have
desire as disposable convenience
what need do we have
for the Magnificat;
for prayer or pilgrimage,
supplication, meditation & incense
or any attempt, no matter how naive
to transcend the brutish fact
of materiality;
existence & mortality?
So the seagulls scrabble among our waste
like avian beggars, safe
only because wings bring freedom,
& ignored or else quietly despised
by the normal
& respectably employed,
like the homeless people
who hide & die
behind the houses
& in the filthy streets.
Dignity is denied to the forgotten.
The marionette parade
Dragging behind you every decision
& memory:
a ragged procession
of skeletal marionettes;
decaying bones hanging limp from
myriad strings,
they dance the maudlin, shambolic
parade of your existence:
the weak blue
deep blue
hollow
fallow
moment
after
moment.
The Cave
Those shadows on the cave wall, distorted,
contorted,
grotesque & tall,
they aren’t shadows at all.
Only mutated shapes;
circus images permeating
fluid;
another trick of a sick mind.
Don’t take it too seriously
but if you
listen too closely to the sounds
they start to drift &
float around
without direction, detached from meaning.
Don’t be ashamed
for acting from the purest of instincts:
fight or flight is joined by frozen
fright as well; belief is
necessary
& to believe in what you see
is so natural it almost
seems like blasphemy not
to just
let it happen.
Words for Ghosts 