ballet
For that which, when posed to oneself, it is true
Can drive you half-mad:
Hunting premise from conclusion and conclusion from premise; tracking assumptions, axioms, arguments
Only to afterwards wonder
Had you any say in the chase at all?
And that which nor science nor priest nor wisdom,
Having though each, their own truth, jealously held
Are still unable to answer
That old philosopher’s question:
Do I have a body? Or, am I one?
Can you hear the long chain rattle?
Great black iron rings, casting nothingness back into nothing
Clattering and roaring, silent as death
Enforcing the empty legislation of the universe:
An unthought
That has us frogmarch forward, ever forward.
Keeping time with time.
We that are born of stars! The universe made awake,
The wide, curious eyes of a cosmos peering into itself
Only to see the mockery of which we ourselves are part:
The looker can see everything but himself; an oblivion with eyes to gaze, but no mirror to see.
We that are born of stars! Our quivering atoms, no different,
No more alive than the cold, physical empty that made them.
History condensed, abbreviated, shackled
Into the humiliating necessity of cause and of effect: What was always was, what will be always will.
O! Great leaders and orators
Whose words, ideas, turns of phrase
Are chronicled so reverently in our yellowing books
Whose legacy of war or redemption or glory or murder
Are whispered still today in awed tones
Their stature inversely magnified by the distance of passing years
No more remarkable
Than two striking balls on a billiards table,
No less trite than a stone tossing down a hill?
But what is that crack
Through which shines such blinding light? What promise does it bring?
Have we found, in the stress-fracture of time our glory and our redemption?
Some imperfection in the perfection?
A glitch in time that looses and unlinks and slips like silk through history’s hard chain:
Unfastened and untethered, free from the iron logic
Our regimented, decaying bodies become the instrument of our liberation
The expression of our feral spirit, outside the bounds of mere corporeal time
Our every choice fills the world with the glorious chaos
Of those noble unnecessaries
Of art and beauty.
We that are born of stars! Illuminating nothingness with a firmament of souls that have smashed and burned and yearned.
We that are born of stars! Our quivering atoms become masters of music and poetry.
Echoing into the abyss the gurgle of baby’s laugh, warm conversation, the limping beat of a broken heart.
The great chain trundles on
But we, vassals neither to time nor god
Change history with the grace of a butterfly’s flutter.
