The tall grass in the field sways when the wind goes over it.
The tall grass in the field sways when a creature passes through it.
The mountains look on, impassive, peaks cloaked by mist.
People wear paths where they tread. And generation after generation follow those same footsteps.
The tall grass in the field sways when the wind goes over it.
The tall grass in the field sways when a creature passes through it.
The mountains look on, impassive, peaks cloaked by mist.
Everything is a series of processes set in motion long ago by the first–itself a series of processes–begun when ending not-ever, but overflowing from the first in great milky gusts of star cloud.
Thus transmuted into inconsequential carbons that comprise me and my fingers tap clumsily at keys that register some runic approximation of my thoughts through processes yet arcane and not understood.
Brain cells and firing neurons and we know not what they truly are as thought and self, perceived, exist within a slab of meat; cut into thin slices enhance image, enhance, enhance until we eventually find a tiny image of an elephant stored within the brain–except…
It is no image of an elephant but an elephant, living and breathing and warm and large. And it smells like an elephant and it sounds like an element, but it lives here in this nothing-space between neurons.
the poet sits
on a simple throne
made of stone
for you he waits
he waits for no one
you are no one
We are made of threads like balls of yarn that stretch between bookshelves that are far apart.
Like knowledge on pages spread like melting butter our thoughts expand beyond the edges that contain us.
Such as it is we cannot be contained, but rather, continue to expand our thoughts and consciousness beyond that which we thought we knew.
And like the butter who first thought its destiny was to be only milk, so too are we transformed by the alchemy of existence into something more than gold.
For gold is a precious metal formed by millions of years of geologic processes; but we are the living thoughts of the universe given form.
As such any attempts to perceive ourselves become tangled and we know not who, or what, we are.
For we are born into this clumsy, violent, rapid, empty, busy siren-song of flashing sounds and blaring lights and we are as lost as time-travellers.
For we are time travellers. That which birthed us so long ago slid (or perhaps did not slide) in ancient pools and oceans beyond our comprehension.
And so on and so on… until we not only had eyes, but also minds with which to fixate on this strangeness. But still we make no sense of it.
The oceans that birthed us still rise and fall and the memories of our ancestors linger within us, mostly unremembered.
Yet we are as much a part of those who came before us as our shadow is part of us. But is a shadow also a part of the ground that it darkens?
Then, are we also part of the ground upon which our shadow falls?
Yes.
Old belongings lay scattered like memories and the boxes that held them are empty.
These objects, once imbued with such power, lie dormant on the floor. They have been reduced to their base components, stripped of memory and context such things become as plastic, metal and paper of no use to anyone at all.
Pick something up and hold it. How does it make you feel? Do the memories come surging, even now? Do you breathe life into this object as the witch doctor and his fetish?
No. Today there are no memories. Today there is only the sound of blood rushing in your ears like the ocean. You are alive and yet you are not the same life. You are the result of a constant shedding, not merely of skin and cell, but also memory and emotion and ideas.
You are a juxtaposition of every mistake you have made and every victory you have celebrated. You are sawdust-shavings of everyone you have lost. You are the very wind itself, the surging storm of memory, all the sadness and the hate and the mistakes–yes, again, the mistakes–and the victories; again, the victories.
You are a box, emptied. You are the belongings, scattered across the floor. You are none of those things.
You are the thought that perceives these words. You are a vibrant living thread, even now forging towards a future that is yours alone.
Again, you will make mistakes. Again, you will be victorious.
But Living Ones Can (2021)
I was attempting to photograph the sun, beset as it was by a heavy shroud of cloud, when a bird appeared–ringed about by a glowing nimbus, soaring upwards in defiance of the gravity and the darkness.
Dead birds can’t fly, I have been known to say. But living ones can.
A coin flipped and thrown in the air, not caught but forever falling through the mutable atoms of the floor and the soil and the stone, and so on it falls directly through the Centre of the Earth where it melts and becomes a sphere of impure metal.
A sphere of impure metal passing through the Centre of the Earth and rising through rock and soil and floor on the other side rises above the hand of one who flipped a coin in a different currency and lands on an outstretched palm.
Is this the story of a coin, or of two coins, or of a sphere of impure metal? Is this some rational explanation of the working of things, or a parable, or some hidden wisdom disguised in tiny letters like an engraving on a coin that tells which year it was made?
Is this the story of a man flipping a coin, or his mirror on the opposite side of the earth who still searches for the coin he flipped and that now he cannot find? Or is it the story of a child in the forest who witnesses a strange coin suddenly leap up from the ground and then fall to the dirt?
Is this the story of the coin or a sphere or a man, or the tiny letters on a coin, or the face on a coin, or does it say something about currency and exchange, or luck or the mutability of atoms, or the unique perspective one has when standing on one particular side (or another) of a sphere spinning through space?
Is this an improbable story about probability, or a story about hope, or a story about absurdity? Is this the crystalised moment that the coin was thrown and an exploration of the myriad possibilities that it contains as it turns in the air?
Or, perhaps, it is none of these and it is only a coin, flipped, and we will never know which way up it lands.
