To my lost lover dancing in a sunbeam:

Woe.
Cynicism destroyed by fire,
light giveth the wonders of heart,
images of strength dispersed among flower petals.

Rain.

Broken noises creep into my consciousness.
I sift and strain, panning with patience at the possibility,
the strain of the decades, the risks that we didn’t even consider,
that grew intractable and sought me out as a martyr,
that you could stay silent and leave me to infinite artforms
is still an expression that caresses my being.

This hope, this knowledge of what could be,
progress within autonomous individuality,
sharing ideas that keep us in some disconnected collective.

Run.

Finding drops of perfection in undeletable nature,
the information that we walk with,
we want to call it knowledge,
we want to say it is true.

Seek.

Stay with me and let me hold your flame,
only until eternity leaves us on an endless wave.

Until the world of man is careful,
until we plant compassion in stable soil,
to watch the roots drive down through mantel
and into the burning core.

Joy.

Why are the myths of love synonymous with the seeds of science?
Is it that we must run blindly into a vast dark cave to gain some enlightened perspective?

Why do we care about morality?

It seems that we seek truth that spans between you and I,

Across the valleys and foundations

of what we should do,

in the landscapes of nowhere yet charted.

There are facts to build in the foundry,

forged in our minds and never tested,

only guessed at,

whittled and refined to the point of possessing solutions.

Thinking and sewing attention into our critical rationalist operation,

with joyful sensations,

overturned by the worms who till the soil at our feet,

in the spirit of creation we go...

Into the Forge

Rita was always an outlier,
always trying break into another level,
never accepting the sickness adrift in the rest of us,
work was spent in the smoke of the furnace,
in breaks she looked back and saw the flailing arm of her girlish self
swinging a hammer while creating her first cabinet,
she looks at her arm now and feels flawless force connect down into sheets of steel,
in flow – in her open-ended artform.

Art isn't easy, nor is it painless,
and soon, at the end of the day, that arm ached,
her instrument of power,
and aches turned into agony,
and ultimately into unemployment,
the means of her production evaporated.

She couldn't pound, she couldn't form, not with that arm.
She spent months waiting for something to heal,
or some news from the doctor,
some new therapy,
but it wasn't available.
She was restricted by tissue,
her body worked against her.

The idea of nothingness dragged on,
her anchor slipped away and she watched helplessly as her body,
her ship
went drifting towards known unknowns:

She could wash onto the rocks.
She could ram into another vessel.
She could drift alone and apart from anyone for years and years.

She could wake upon a sandy beach and take responsibility for all the new possibilities,
to find a new extension of all that pounding,
that knowledge – of shaping and movement,
force and material.
That time came and she began to live behind the wheel of a new form,
standing behind the veil of her own skin denying the most oblivious thing to do,

to create again but through thinking alone,
to go forth without the attachments
of arm or tool
or anything outside of what is absolutely essential.
Essential ever since man walked out of the valleys and into a new foundation,
into infinity and explanation,
to the landscapes of nowhere yet charted,
that is where she would mine her ore.

There were elegant facts to build in her new foundry,
a place that could be rebuilt or razed at a whim,
she began to see that she was always going to be injured,
be it by accidents or ignorance,
she sat and accepted that this first glance weakness was the source of everything inspired.

She was an unbounded immense world of possibilities,
She was a world undeveloped and immensely misunderstood by the multiple I’s existing inside,

weeks passed and weakness solidified into philosophical bedrock,
she began whittling again like she did in the old forge,
her moral choices became structures stronger with every systematic choice,
to the point of possessing serene solutions,
created in ideas stronger than steel
but as adaptable as clay,
evolving and creating joy
by way of this new criticism,
crafted in stainless sensations.

My Bookshelf

is mobile and not docile,
it self-rearranges,
and that isn't a metaphor,
my books dance like the waves of prose contained inside them,
they move as radically as the thoughts of Deutsch or Dawkins,
bouncing with every bump of the road,
sometimes falling off the shelf as if my Yosemite Bigwall book is demanding ascension.

Or as if that book from my love was willing me to think of her,
to give her a call where she wouldn't answer again,
and I would leave a message even though…well you know…it’s 2018.

I built these shelves with my father,
he's in there – his busted thumb and all the errors
we made.
That we made after I saw those old westfalias,
I trusted that German utility.
We hacked and refined and specified the space to make it somewhat me proof,
no hinges or complications, no doors,
nothing fancy,
just some boards cut with care while I reminded him that I also know how to use the table saw,
but he so viscerally flowed into the craft of it all that I would just stand aside him watching
with respect at the efficiency of blade and movement.

There's the new section we built last Christmas break,
It's already ingested some of my used math books,
I worry about their spines,
anymore falls will leave them destined for an unstable amount of packing tape.
There’s also the shelf over my bed with the books friends have lent or unintentional given me.

and then there's those books with a self similarly to reality,
containing a reflexive reflection to nature in printed pages,
containing explicit explanations of earthly bodies written by sages,
Feynman's there angelically flapping in every page,
his joy threatening the wood his work rests in,
his eternal radiance jiggling so chaotically it’s barely contained in its ink.

And there's me below them in bed playing with pixels at 4am,
just willing the day to come so the sunshine can fill the leaves.

Ripples

I have been surviving being dragged to the shore
In this fight, this acted out play, of my cast of internal actors,
Of discreet thespians violently waking up to my senses,
By a child in a alarm clock costume.
This awakening has happened so many times my back is calloused from the sand and cement of the road that I come back to consciousness at.

My head – this theater ran by robots,
This automated drama that feels lost and out lines,
the shuffle goes on,
facial contortions bring no continuity till the final act.

In a recursive rain scene which starts a fire,
Caused by the simulacrum of synapses that short circuit,
snapping carbon and oxygen into reunion,
and then comes the flood of the fire sprinklers which wash me away again,

into the sea,

Where so many bodies lie broken and disconnected from their breathing.

I sink again and attempt to remember the contrarian boy who is curious enough question at the water's edge.
Hoping he'll pay attention to his senses so I'll be saved from drowning again in that deep pond mindlessness, of apathy,

Saved for another moment where I can play my part.

Unfurl your self-consciousness and step over the fulcrum, that tipping point so you can lift yourself into ultra openness, seek to see the jungle of every possible operation, take stabs into the constraints, and watch as nature bleeds beauty but does not degrade into anything less than it ever was, still as explicable – still explainable.