Pocket mirror in Narcissus’ hand
the ever-gazed, most-loved love
Isn’t beauty’s fairness a virtue to consume?
Ruinous mirror whose shattered shards
reflect a thousand monstrous eyes
Is facade or truth not worth devouring you?
Unventured hero of stillborn soul
lost beyond your surface deep
Is it worthiness that lurks beneath?
Mirror, mirror for lonesome heart
steamed by breath, still cold to touch
Is your company but an artifice?
Standing amid the stream, I am awash with time
knowing each part only the once
before life goes its way beyond me
But beached as I am, well within my mind’s eye
where waves crash over me again and again
I relive the moments lost to me in the stream
What can be said of mathematics
that heavenly theoretic, pure of human taint
a moon we look upon from afar
distant and distorted, can only touch its reflection
And below that rippling surface, another world rages under
Mammon’s poison, scarce lizard impulses
We fleshy mortals sandwiched between the Platonic and Plutonic
yearning for a taste of the divine, a kiss
must sip at muddy waters, must wrestle what lies beneath
‘To new beginnings’, mutters the wormlord as he burrows backwards
Janus, more generously the God of gateways,
squeezes his rear against the walls of the tunnel
Excreted slime eases the laboured movements
He carves new grooves into the tunnel face
Makes new tunnels that cut fresh paths into time
Reaches back to forge new histories for himself
‘In this one I’ll not be a worm’
Janus endures his sufferances twice for every failure
once forward and then back
before he carves again new grooves
Write, re-write, re-write, write
Even Janus, the God of gateways,
cannot change his fate as a worm.
When you have your life in its entirety before you,
your complete body of work – how to go about experiencing it?
Pre-existence tech is such a trip these days
Previous versions were only available for linear consumption,
moving from birth to death like a worm – sequential existence, how outdated a concept
With v2.0 our aim was to achieve something less passive
We call it the sampler model:
drop in to key moments for a variety of appetisers
before selecting how to program the remainder as the main meal
Some clear their veggies first, others their carbs
Some like their foods segregated – why not the same choice with the seconds of your life?
Rip through the pain first if you so wish
or alternate pain and joy to better tolerate the bad times
v2.0: How you choose to feast on your life is finally up to you
For years I barely spoke except a little at supper
and then I would lock myself away in the cellar
my human instincts blinkered, devolved
more grunts than grammar
So it was in grief that I built my instrument
the smallest gateway no larger than a florin
a desperate soul’s ingenious plea
it pierced the universe into God’s kaleidoscope
And through the eyepiece I watched fractal, sharded realities
paths not taken and events that never occurred
but those fancies aside, I saw you again
I saw the sum of existence
and in its maths was your superposition
What a monster I am
to quantify my daughter as some probabilistic
I rank my personal efforts with you against the averages
and saw that my failures were my own and only my own
I just wanted a way to see you happy again
You spear throwers think yourselves apex
speak yourselves deep into this delusion
as though you came to the fire and not it to you
all the creatures of the kingdom play chase
so tell me why man prefers to hide than seek
except that in your heart of hearts you recognise
you are still the prey and something hides in the brush
–
The prison is all but complete, hell manifest
and the meat bicker over who holds the keys
and who paints the cells
A strange feeling that men dare forget our place
in this world, yet we grow numb and weary,
a surprise to feel at all
we who imbue land with life
who carried your kind to term
now relegated to whisper, fated to fade
and you who took so much for so little
savage the earth and understand not gratitude
we will have no more of it
we become alien and wild to you
and when the great singing stops and the soils turn white
the debt will be settled
New England woodlands hostile come nightfall
dark forests untamed by church presence
where hard eyes watch white men, Christian uninitiates
with bloodthirsty eagerness for transgressions
The great library grows wilder in its growing
and each day a new wing is built
larger than everything previous combined
to house the exponential production in books
books, books, books
and what’s contained within them increasingly esoteric or tangential
Irrelevant feelings and idle thoughts documented on paper
in time no doubt incoherent gibberish will step over the shrinking bar
all of it is knowledge, for sure, but is all knowledge sacred or worth saving?
much of it underbrush to the towering trees of canonised wisdom
The lone librarian makes judicious use of her opaque filing system
sifts the endless tomes into hierarchies of pertinence
if it tends to infinity, what good is the library without her?
just an endless labyrinth of noise
that swallows signal
Perhaps we ought to burn it all down
and start over whilst we still can
before the definitions blur any further
and the wildfires become uncontrollable
abdulj. 