doorway

Make a single random mark on a virgin page.
It kills time and ravages space.
Interruption blemishes the skin
Of crystal water, a pebble tossed in.
The surface occluded, the depth a torrent,
Clarity unsettled, by an act of will.
Wait.
It will penetrate and gradually abate,
Working it’s way to the ocean of peace.

None of this is real.
The peace remains.
Wait.

The door is the same on either side.
Symmetry a certainty, though it may hide.
The door unhinged swings down.
A window veils the ground.
We ache in our bones,
The matter in our hand,
We crave the pureland.

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sarva swaha!

death is negligence.

if we allow death its place in our lives, death will outwit death.

stay awake, wait and watch for renewal. it happens every morning.

or, sleep and be patient for the gifts it brings. it happens every year.

unlock the door.
do you want to die in there?

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Glimmer

I have felt it, sensed it in moments of reverie or despair.
At either extreme, there is a kind of glimmering lure in the air
Towards an admirable madness that is so irresistible.
It is an ersatz exemplar of the hero’s journey, the odyssey.
I have been to the edge - have looked over lover’s leap.
Considering the possible and impossible, overwhelmed
Sometimes with more, sometimes less caution, I attend.
Frozen facing such an acrobatic altitude and intent.
I cry or laugh alternately, concurrently, out of awe
For a featureless future - polished obsidian, impenetrable, ultimately empty
Mirror, or echo, image and imagination, perfected for projection
Or a blinding, brilliant narcissistic reflection.
Some time it blank, bland and boring, some time is suffocating,
Occasionally, prompting a pure and petrifying,
Crawling, clawing claustrophobia closing in
Close to the skin, quickly penetrating within.
Self awareness is calved by a berg, a blade of ice razor thin
With incredible precision a diamond collision, cleft it like flint,
It holds an edge with a vengeance, witless with it’s rage
Until light dawns on the world as it turns from age to age.
There is a thaw, a sublimation, and the water finds a synapse
I realize, I turn myself, spinning clockwise as my knees collapse.
I fall backward headlong into a decompensating relapse.
My wings work only as they will, I follow the vapor way.
Vanishing, evaporating on a tumescent translucent wave.

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Thief of time
by iconimago

Awaiting the regular hours to slowly slip away
As they courtage into the past day after day
Clock watching,
Watch clocking,
Start walking.

The macrocosm is slightly askew.
What has that to do with us? I ask you.

Creditors -
Predators
Capitalism -
Cannibalism

Time dilation is
Timed annihilation

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Melancholy
By iconimago

Perhaps I was a warrior in my distant history.
Destruction an all important role in my story.
Now an artist, the creative impulse compulsory,
Still, I am incomprehensibly inconsolably sorry.
Some enemy melancholy pursues a treacherous meander
Behind me, through a valley fragrant, abloom with oleander.
Attractive are her capabilities, her anesthetic properties.
So tempted, I to stop the chase and partake of it’s acrid tincture
That I sit still and ponder until I have a clear fulfilling picture
Of it’s inner beauties, qualities and endless possibilities.
Instead of steeping the graceful bough I broke in order to brew it,
With caution, I withdrew my crayon and sleepily, I drew it.
The creeping river of melancholy presentiently knew it.
She overtook my slumbering brain and calmly, she withdrew it.
Carried along under force of a flowing momentous impetus
My mind give over under pressure of the enormous omnibus.
Travel has been a boon for my brain, but for the drowning sorrow,
I know the river’s lowering course. So, I pull my self in to follow.
A journey neither begins nor ends under the feet but in our core,
A soul’s darkest depths, unknown, an ocean, non-being is the shore.
No encompassing sense, all cardinal points migrate, and they shift.
And being sounds its aching drone, a heart of one alone, adrift.

Arrival was on a winged wave who crested on sand of crystal pure.
Shining down, a sun at dawn and a moon setting on a path of cure.
Her effulgent face as a disk in my eye, a shine reflecting full,
All blemish gone, she shone straight through within my vacant skull.
On the lighted spot, sparked a mindless thought, a circle is a hole.
So out within and out with all, no dust, no mirror no mind.
No journey, no chase, I’ve nothing lost and nothing will I find.

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He awakes from a dream. The TV a diversion, he hopes to lull himself back to sleep. Memories come at random. Cool Sunday evenings in autumn, his father watched football, an announcement “60 Minutes will air in its entirety after the game.” His mother watched 60 Minutes. His father grilled steaks. The dinner table set, the family sat down to dinner. His teeth pushed at the warm salted meat. The outside, rough with little dark granules, that were slightly bitter and gritty. The meat tore. Inside, the flavor was earthy and bland, leaving a filmy taint behind. After the meat, the salad was cool and wet. The crisp leaves made a tiny burst of fresh water in his mouth, releasing a fresh smell and flavor and cleansing part of his mouth. The flavors were subtle hints, impressions, suggestions that went by virtually unnoticed. Nothing was said.
His mind wanders… The TV is square. The wall is flat and square. The bed is square. The room is a box… Add up all the odd numbers. 1, 3, 5... They add up to the perfect squares. One is a perfect square. One squared is one. One plus three is four – two squared. One plus three plus five is nine – three squared. It starts out complete, and it goes on like that, complete apparently forever. Memories don’t add up like that - to perfect squares.
He gets up, concluding that he won’t get back to sleep. Rounding the corner, he walks outside, and he feels the sun on his face again, as if for the first time. He looks up at the sun. In the sunrise, there are rays of light streaming straight to the earth, breaking through the brilliantly lit cumulus. The clouds look like sheepy pillows. The sky is misted with wisps of sheer silken threads, gold and silver cirrus floating in front of sheets of stratus, varying in their shades of blue. That sky looks like a comfortable bed. Those sunbeams radiate from the central point of the sun. His teachers told him this is what inspired the pyramids of Egypt. And yet, he thought, these radiating sunbeams would not form a square-based pyramid. They would always form a cone. Evidently, there has been something amiss from the foundation.
He remembered his teachers telling him that the pyramid was meant to represent the body of the earth itself. Its size and shape were apparently calculated and integrated into the building plans from the base up. The plans also incorporated pi in the relationship of the base to the height, but they missed it by a few hundreths. Pi is an irrational number. An irrational number! No wonder they got it wrong, people hate things that are irrational. People oppose the imperfection they see in the world. So, they project a perfected image of the world, and the spherical body of the earth is represented as a square-based pyramid. The world needs sweeping, but in the imperfection of the world is perfect reality. It is not our duty to perfect the world, but our image of the world.
He sits on the grass beside a single dandelion. It looks toward the sun. He looks at the radial flower, interdependent - one flower. One is complete from the start, prime, its own perfect square, irreducible. Everything is divisible by it. Its simplicity is profound, a good starting point. Then a second thought, one is not a starting point. Zero is. Between zero and one there is infinity, and infinity begins and ends between zero and one. Surprising. Beautiful. Irrational. One is qualitative and quantitive - oneness. Everything is falling away, out of one. Everything is divisional, fractional, broken from one. And yet, everything is within the one. We can start with anything in the world, and it will lead back to ourselves. If we start with ourselves, it will lead to the whole world. Seek your own life, and you will lose it. Seek to lose your life, and it will be saved. Oh well, maybe I should try to go back to sleep again. I’ve always been a dreamer. A few moments later, his father comes by doing yard work. Damn weeds!

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