Dear reader,
I am treading the space between many unwelcome events and situations that are beyond my control. Frustration, fear, and sorrow are my companions. Personally, situations are ending and uncertainties loom. Choices and changes have come due. My fiction writing can’t compete with reality—it feels disrespectful, wasteful. An essay on the state of me is in the works but it’s hard to put words together. Yet the words must come. That’s when poetry takes the stage.
Wayward,
—C
Mother's legend boasts That I came into the world Astonished Intently bewildered Peculiarly aware With eyes wide And The beginnings of a furrowed brow
We from others born into everything Into a weirdness described as existence As consciousness At a particular point in the unfathomable vastness Of space and time At the frothing edge of the Human Event Dreaming the past and future As we sleep presently Snug in our bed of modernity Humming a brainworm balad Of human see, human hear Human think, human do Over and over and over and over— A dizzy delirium biting a vestigial tail Pruning our mind’s eye Into a soothing focal range Blinded to our belonging By sovereignty's estranging
Lone wanderers left bereft Within the war we declared Clawing for meaning Between our schisms Scrambling for shelter From the slash and hack Flash and crack Of our haughty severance Still, the unbound glory is conspicuous Its nested multiverses naked And we exist within them Through them, made of them And these obvious realities reside Within an uncountable number Ever beyond us Imperceptible, unknowable Phases Epochs Spectra Fields States Planes Realms Dimensions
Greeting multiplicity is uncanny
The handshake of multitude, eldritch
And awe denied roosts as terror and catastrophe
But if welcomed across mind's battle lines
They forever remain and remind:
You are a crossroads
A confluence
A bubble within a boil of thought
A collage of others and events and stories
An amalgam of place and time and chance
A vertex of the infinite lattice
A witness, a mirror, a turn of the spiral
An antenna amid frequencies abyssal
There is no separation
No exceptional autonomy
No exclusionary destiny
There is no you
Without all else
And into the comforting prison
Of our conceit
Appears
An unwalled cathedral
Of fabric and forces eternal
Of beings and orders choral
Calling to our lonely bones,
Welcome home