Where Are You…

When the words of which you’ve read shift seemingly at random by some pseudo-intellectual sciolist author’s edit. Unsure yourself whether it’s obsessive revision and the perpetual search for subjective perfection? Or a whimsical splurge lamely revised by Dr Attempted-Mischief and his misfit cryptic cohorts?

Maybe either or neither.

When looking to the heavens all signs are obscured by clouds that shift to another’s purpose. A comfort blanket or some vampiric cloak unendingly drawn to permanently conceal?

You just don’t know.

When the words of which you’ve re-read cease to fit the recollection. Check. Check them again against an older copy – but to detect takes time. And time itself is unfavourably pliant, it’ll misguide you.

So don’t waste it.

When, with feet firmly to the ground perhaps, you read those words and fix them in place by rote. Ground is no base. Ground I’ll inform you edges one way at the speed of a growing fingernail, another at the roundabout speed of a 24 hour day; yet no day the same length as the last. Warped too this land on which you stand; added to and eroded by sea and tide. Or ploughed aside by the dozers in the wake of the marchers of progress. And memories anyway, whether forced in by said rote or blotted up by interest; they swing this way and that; any recollection can be hijacked and rewritten simply by your own mood of the moment.

So forget that.

When the words you read are transferred by chisel to mountain. Yes, look to Mother Earth, take comfort in the bosom of her being as you etch one of her many breasts: that unbalance her sphere to spin out and trick you those uneven 24 hour days. Mother Earth that holds those oceans and land and makes no apology for her perigees and apogees; whose children in their billions fight so readily and redly in tooth and claw, demolishing themselves and history with their doings; that mother who swallows her own mountains! No solace in this world where these words matter just fleetingly and for that only in the minds of its apes and their zeitgeist.

Lay down your crude tools.

When the words you’ve read may be illuminated by peeling back the covers of your comfort blanket – yes, get some measure by moon and stars. Here you are, only it’s not where you think you are. Up there the stars are loosely beholden to their Newtonian purpose and lensed out of place by invisible influences–dark ones, un-wholly so. And the unreliable moon, it’s letting you go anyhow and looping out farther by the day.

I may lay down the pen too in this quest at least–ultimately nibless.

When the words have no frame of reference and there’s you all unsure-footed too, unfixed to this land, its satellite and all that’s unplaceably local. Temporary lodgers and associates bound by elastic threads to each other and to a burning furnace that will one day ebb from its yellow and flow to an all-engulfing ‘big red‘. You’re spinning, you, all of you and them, round and elliptically round, all tracing your ever-varying, ever so personal, spring shaped spirals; loosely lassoed as your dominant partner blazes its path through something coined ’The Western Arm’ by someone unknown to most. An arm whose body is a bigger altogether and less together dust cloud that holds celestially you Mary Celestes. All committed all of you, every vagrant particle of every one of your beings, to something supermassive that hunkers (comfortable for now in a creamy whey) but long-term hankers to have you–its prey.

There you are.

 

an answer

 

Additional

Who Am I…

When my anger to one is as great as my love of another
When harmony, congruence and conflation are elusive
When confliction, dissonance and conflagration are all pervasive
When the opinions I voice are drowned internally by floods of hypocrisy

When I mould my persona to suit the ones I’m with
When my anima and animus brawl on the flotsam of dead opinion
When incidents and circumstance invoke moods that deny reason
When reason anyhow is born from culture and conformity

When my desire for swift justice is knee jerked itself by responsibility
When I wait forever for something but know not why or what for
When arousal in the interim is sated and slopped out as disgust – and never discussed
When the clothes I don shape me into what they represent – briefly

When a lie in my own mind is the truth in the minds of others
When that lie then overwrites the truth in mine
When I’m sucker punched by appearance for ignoring substance
When I wish for aphorisms but wind up with wound up anaphora – repeatedly

 

I guess what’s next. tbc