Time is the villain!
Where is the city?
Struck out of time!
Where is it builded?
On the brink of truths and lies_
Not truth and falsity, oh no;
Nothing so grand.
Here we are sunk on the abyss of discrete fibs,
Innocent misobservations, brilliant speculations,
That turn out wrong and kill_
Oh, there is so much less truth
In the universe than anything else.
Yes, even here we founder
On the fill of language, quick ash of desire.
So you have seen the moon?
And that other body ...
The right and left testicles of God,
So heavy with tomorrow they tore through the veil
To dangle naked above us all?
Then what was that in the sky today?
God's womb punched inside-out
And blazing with her blood,
Looking like a moment ago
She had passed the egg of the earth
And it's polar body we've so
Cavalierly dismissed from singularity?
Is God a sow, who devours her young and gets heartburn?
Is God the garter snake Ouroboros,
Gagging on the tip of his own tail?
Or is God just a category-concept mistake,
A process the universe performs, indulges in,
Or inflicts on itself,
Through necessity or chance,
For arcane reasons you and I will never discover?
Being is a function of time.
It's just a hole, a little hole, on whose rim we've been
Allowed, for an eye's blink, to perch,
Watching that flow, terrible for all of us,
Tragic for some of us, in which the future hisses
Through the potter's field, to bury ashes of the past.
Very deep, indeed, and dried up;
And dusty.
And spiked with bone like pongee pits.
Was it a heart of fire up there today?
Or just a dollop of what burns,
Squeezed out of the cosmic gut_
To it's great relief!
Maybe it was our sun, hurtling by on its way
To somewhere else; and all that's left to us now
Is to grow colder and older,
Every day in every way,
Gracefully as possible.
How long did this light last?
Oh my poor, sick, doomed, and
Soon-to-be-obliterated children,
Ask instead how long
Is the darkness that follows!
Reason for writing:
I had the good fortune (if you can call it that), to view a
partial eclipse of the sun, sometime in the mid 1970's. It
struck me that people were making altogether too big a deal
out of the astronomical phenomena, indeed some attaching a
mystical significance. The whole mush of ideas stirred
around in my head a while, and then this turned out. There
are times when I think it makes sense, and other times I'm
not so sure.
Birth sign: Not entered
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