Calculus reveals itself to be the study of my fears. The tangent to a curve is a line, a rock slung into the void of space, a cannonball flight untempered by gravity, a prognosis insulated from relationship and possibility. If we take the vector properties of this miniscule instant, extrapolate them, and play the tape, well… uh oh. When the Studebaker is whipping around a turn, an antique rocking chair strapped inadequately to the roof, once […]
I was sitting on the squishy bottom of a short stack of water about three feet tall, beneath a full sun, fully clothed, buttons made up, with little bubbles hiding out in my eyelashes, watching a fish watch me back through the grass, thinking about the strange economies of tadpoles and turtles, wondering what that brewing pain was inside of my chest, as I was somehow temporarily without my memory of the direct effects of […]
A self is a heavy burden to carry with you across the desert. Despite being invisible and weightless in principle, it is the often overlooked, but necessary battery of accoutrements that are required to render the self manifest and functional that take their toll. There is the steamer trunk full of historical data, for instance, with its rather robust coefficient of sliding friction across the hot sand– the modern take on an old classic, a […]
At one level, the human body is an Enigma– a code machine. All day long they run: informing, creating, conducting. There’s the genetic code, sure. Then there’s the histone code, the sugar code, the signal transduction code, the ubiquitin code, the adhesive code, the splicing code, the tubulin code, the metabolic code, and so on and so forth. Kids, too– they know this game. We’ve all dabbled. We sprinted across the yard, dove into leaf piles, barked […]
The heavy lifting is done in the invisible realms. What’s left to be done here is simplicity itself. Beauty emerges from tending to the obvious. Get some water. Carry stones. When we’re like this, we live inside of choreography, though we’ve never seen the script. We couldn’t read it, anyways– ten million movements on planes of existence whose names we cannot understand, all conspiring to make our next step plain. Just take it. Don’t wonder about what […]
They look at me funny when I tell them I’m a cosmic stunt man, like I have a condition because I can’t stop coming to Jesus about the elaborate nature of this phenomenal ruse. Like indifference is a rational response to having undergone such a prompt step into existence, to having donned that stretchy, knowledge-retardant suit and climbed down the business end of a circus artillery piece, only to fall asleep just prior to the moment […]
It is possible, strange though it may seem, to imagine that right now is a most exquisite Love note written with you in mind, to imagine that this very moment– with all its shortcomings, flaws, minor aches and pains, pain killers, and just plain killers, the war department, the paperwork, and the miffed populace in which you’re mired– is a tactical choreography offered in the only language you yet understand, suggesting with all due respect that […]
Illusion is a grid of two-way streets, an endless network of choices. Asphalt riddled with diesels, sirens, and street lamps. Buildings with decisions stacked up to the sky like trays of factory-laid eggs waiting for chicks. Dropped ceiling meanings. Angled views. Helo pads on top. A strange silence up there. What if the engine fails? Parachute racks, lightning rods and hose reels. Tightropes strung from peak to peak. Wind socks for safety and guidance. The heavy […]
For a time it was vitally important that I witness the sunset, that I look up from whatever act of commerce or gastronomy had caught my attention that day and look west, to pause and listen to far away places that seemed, for just a moment, to pour through the offices of my heart in fleeting snippets of a cosmic dialect. That was the moment, the precise time to say it: whatever this is… I […]
A skull is a resonating chamber, a human-shaped bottle for storing echoes. A Great Mystery holds me up to its ear– who is listening to Whom? Awareness merges with such a sound, vanishes. A skull is an organic amplifier, a condenser of ethereal transmissions, an inwardly-curving bone around a hollow void, meant to be dipped daily in a field of silence– held to the ear of a Great Mystery. Over time, carefully tended, the silence […]
Embracing Forever 