Scissiparity

 division of division of division of division of division of...

one

                  branching

                                            into another

                            we come

                            in

ex-

perience                                                                     of se

                                -paration

                                                                  borne

                     between

                              a branching

(The mystery of the origin of life as it is related in mythology or the beliefs of the world’s major religions may be cast as the following problem:  how can something come from nothing?  Or rather, how can life come from death, or at least nonlife?)

                                                I and this mystery here we stand

                              above,                                                           below

beyond                                                 behind

“no name no tongue has soiled it”

                                                                  the mind / the spirit

                                         leaps!   to hold it, to behold it

HOWEVER,

The animate and the inanimate are not so logically discrete as we might like to think.  
E.g. the virus.

Why should death be the defining experience of humanity?

1. because it is universal?

2. because it causes the ego pain?

                                                                              fuck that

A collision of molecules brought you into being,

                                you in-process you

a process never present to itself as complete

                                            because,

                                            completed, it no longer           is

itself

                                                                    What molecule(s)

                              will you meet

                              that stop

                                                                           the becoming you

that you are?

AND IF (ah, the beauty of “if”)

                                                        you bumped into

other

             molecules?

                                                        (“Hey Mikey!  He likes it!”)

AND YES (good old “yes”)

the bird, the wind, the wave,                       the star, the clock

The mysterious                                   “and”

            the mysterious    “yes”             &            “earth”

                                                       a plural of parts

in

                                -finity

part AND part

                     night AND day

                                            pain AND joy

bbbbbbbbbbbbbb

               empty of unity

                                              AND

                                                            empty of transcendence

                        

                                     Yes!

Not What They're Looking For

Today one is taking out the garbage of judgments.

They stand in noisy steel bins outside the mind.

It was the clutter, the clatter of others,

The self parsed by the self, that had to go.

And yet it is hard to part with what feels

So familiar, like a second skin

The way a chevalier must have felt

Steeled in comfort astride his horse

Staring at the latest, the villainous harquebusier.

Is it a matter of life and death?

The death of something, yes.  Invisible,

Molecular, a spring cleaning in winter,

The smashed and bundled furniture of the spirit

(Gaping at its vacancy) brought to the curb

For the homeless scavengers to pick over

Till the garbage men arrive.

In throwing it out they are what they are,

Free, stinking, and strong,

Whatever Tsarina and her minions think,

Of themselves, and of their own glass Easter eggs.

Brownfield SIte

Drifting into the corner a knot of thread

Not of wire plugged into the dirt of a sofa

In the forest the walls soaked in urine

Like the earth just a portion of which

Can never return here to what was built

Are layers of paint on broken walls still

Layers under choked vines when the core

Of the wall exposed is cracked and laced

With the song of a hospital’s mother

Everything incites us to walk deeper

Into abandon the leaves the pharmacy

The dank tile floor of the woods

Now would be the time for a story

A pang of suspense in the rank brown air

But sometimes the stories are over

Told once and dispersed in aerosol bursts

Signed dark outside the abandoned lair