Do you think?

The rabbit holes wandered,

the fallen trail,
the fell tree in the path,
the oaky and alpine scent.

Thoughts that paint your poetic perception.

Evoke,
embed,
sort out the void.

Spread the gold across the seemingly impossible expanse.

What is it? What is it?

The testable, the abstract,
the channel to flip nature against herself,
that subtle switch, giving herself away in rations.

Each part a distinction between reality,
reality at large, reeling in the big one,
the crucial one, the experiential one:
Where will the photon strike?

This wanted symmetry: what am I to see? And what is the world to actually be?

Constructions, conjectures, blessings sent to ignorant testers,
who probe at the edge of reasons' superstructure.

Curated primaries

Lifeless algorithms

Selfless liveliness

Forgetting a path of local falsity.

Explanationists

Everyone contributes to their own mind,
inside is their very own conception of the universe,
packed intricately into a cubic foot of folds.

 
These places can be visited,

we can build onto each other’s minds,

to explore each other’s worlds.

Multi-generational, massively complex buildings breathe inside us.

A furnace that radiates love:
an idea in mind we remake infinitely better.

Tweaking things slightly,
adding on new additions,
setting up scaffolding,
bringing in neighbors to help,
assembling new theories to improve ourselves,
and thus the world.

We are the girls and boys playing at the end of the cranial culdesac.
We are lifeforms who form discoveries,
making our explanations evermore interwoven with each other.

These are our homes, our palaces,
our forges, our laboratories,
and our forests.

This is our land to explore,
this is our property to build our future possibilities on top of.

The Kick

For Richard Feynman

We're all wondering,
on a ball spinning,
we find patterns,
on an orb we lie scattered.

This exploration within lines traced,
and then dug into wood, with a hard-edged tool,
printing portraits of an ocean of molecules,

Elegance:
a nude figure brings a teardrop to Zorthian’s eyes,
and Feynman laughs at the newly unearthed theory.

We are optimist,
for the joy of it:
“the kick of the discovery.”

These psychedelic fuzzy ideas,
swim in hot pools of our understanding,
hinting at quantum worlds,
seeing the unseen,

hitting atoms,
seeking the shapes to these structures,
explicit to us egalitarians,
to us: people — explainers.

Daring to explore
a world of secrets,
forever at the edge of knowledge.

Spin Atomic Goddess, Spin!

For Zoe Ciupitu

A veil breaks away,

revealing sky and space,

supported by this lovely being,

atoms balanced like spinning plates in air,

twirling effortlessly in amused artistry.

I see you walk below that heaven you support,

this mortal world we scramble within,

as lovers, heartful creators,

these depictions of paths universal,

our paths,

our tracks

adapting to unknown topography.

I see you fly towards earth,

     catching yourself with an immense ethic,

        that we shall not be without mistakes—

             that we can grow again:

                  to once again scratch at perfection.

Years will go by and we'll grip onto each other.

A fall.

Years will go by and we'll build each other up.

Ascension.

Supported interests, sewing intersections,

wanting another, 

weaving love eternal,

my strawberry girl.

Hurling the slightest glances at the sky,

knowing that she will always be there,

looming.

A Hot Knife Through our Nation's Retina

Past the optic nerve and into the brain
rests the tired mind of these United States of America.

The world will see us,
in the weight of history,
in the survival of our enlightened ideas:

Non-violence. Intolerance only to intolerance.
Peace. Progress. Trial and error-correction.
The individual over the group. Reason.

A blindfolded teenager sits in the middle of protest and counter-protest.

Choosing only to experience loving-kindness.

A spark, a riot,
a choice, an action.

Our rights,
our objective knowledge,
our convictions and understanding
are built on sand—
a towering bundle of birdlike nests.

To transform that sand into glass,
melting down every bit
that doesn't reach our ever-rising bar.

The sidelines, the couch, the armchair opinion,
the silent majority, the optimists
going to work
to be a part of the ever-expanding puzzle:

to build generations of critical,
creative,
rational,
compassionate
human beings.