Special Effects

comments 6
Poetry

Time’s ruse is that it appears to pass.
Every appearance, even voices,
are a special effect.  These echoes
of the Invisible deceive me not.
Every instance of drowning I endured
came in the flood of something special.
Show me the One who never speaks,
and I will fall to my knees and listen,
unmasked, mute and reverent.
Change is the right-hand man of time,
his charlatan enabler,
the fragrance of sweet liquor
hanging in the aftermath of yesterday,
the drug of choice
for all those who would ransom
what can never be bought or sold, only given,
by hiding in worlds of unburned ashes.
If you can interpret it, or assign meaning
to or from it, then it will burn eventually.
You think burning means a fire, a blaze of glory,
but I say it is an ambush of a thing’s true essence–
fast time, a getting to the point.
Revelation is not an effect at all.

When You’re not around
my pain flowers, time passes,
and I resort to talk like this.
Caught in a cage that won’t hold still,
my longing makes anger look
like a silly board game.
I shake in withdrawal,
time’s trickery leaking out my pores.
Tick tock digital clock
the harbingers of time I do defrock.
Practicing the art of leaving
where I never was, I return.
Every moment is a prayer,
and every prayer this shift in focus.
Time is ill-equipped to handle this event–
can’t make sense of conscious lightning,
of our arrival at the willingness to Love,
of this everywhere-shared instantaneity.
What could have happened, some will ask,
if it looked like nothing at all?
What can there be that leaves no ash
in its Revelation?

If I am not a special effect,
then what am I?
I am that which leaves no mark.
This distinguishing characteristic
is all that remains after time’s fire has passed.
Do you not see it?
It is what we have been given.

6 Comments

  1. I love the way your writing trips up my brain. When it finally gives up and sits on the sofa, I feel the little child of my soul laughing and somersaulting through your prose. How delightful! This is beautiful, to shake oneself up and not fall into the ordinary programmed steps of life, but to jump out and see it from a new spot. Thank you for keeping the adventure alive my friend!

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    • Thank you… I actually wrestled with this one quite a bit and never quite felt like I got what I wanted to onto paper. One of the most interesting experiences going is to see how another responds to what we put forth. I find your own writing to be comforting, insightful, entertaining, and soul-stirring all at once. A real treat!

      Michael

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  2. Michael,

    I literally was just watching this the day before yesterday:

    I had hauled my computer to my husband to show him the clip that begins at 2:30 left on the show (the whole conversation beings at 43:44 into the program) as over the past weeks we have been discussing how experiencing this reality when you peek behind the curtain might be like a video game where what is behind you is not there until you look and what is out in front of you is only there to the horizon of your sight in rendering…there is a special video game programing description for this process that my husband told me, but at this moment of writing it has slipped my mind. We also have been talking about how it all might really be a “Truman Show” / “Vanilla Sky” scenario with our own unique watchers looking over us, helping when allowed and cheering us on.

    Wonderful stuff I have been contemplating.

    Special effects indeed. xx

    -x.M

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  3. First thing is, thank you for the word: ‘instantaneity’, wonderful… just saying it in my mind – the sound of it. Then the phrase where it came from: ‘this everywhere-shared instantaneity’. It was my entry point, and started to consider that every moment is ‘a shift in focus’. Any other way of seeing it comes from the special effects department. All kinds of things that’ll occupy my contemplations today. Thank you for all of it…

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    • Ha! You’re quite welcome. I had to look that one up a few times to be sure it was real, but it seemed real enough. What is real, anyway??? It made for a special effect.

      Thanks as always for your visit.

      Michael

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  4. Pingback: arrivals – departures | dhamma footsteps

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