mahiwaga

What is going through my head?

It’s 1:30 in the morning and I have to go to work tomorrow, and madness spins through my brain, like a whirlwind of deranged birds.

Hope. You can’t eat hope, is the problem. Hope doesn’t pay the bills. It doesn’t keep you warm in the middle of the night when the gas company shuts your heat off. Hope won’t make you smarter, stronger, wiser, faster.

And, yet, the possibilities are exponential.

Can I just hang on to this random scintillating spark of hope? Can I continue to wish uninterrupted, and dream of impossibilities?

Maybe not in this life, nor the next, but at least let me pretend?

To find the way, you must search for it
but you cannot search for it without losing it first
and how can you lose the way if you have never found it?

The way is what is
we are born to it without knowing
when we know is when we go astray
and there is no turning backwards
whichever direction you face is always forward,
and every beginning is an ending
though the way has neither beginning nor end.

Isn’t the branch still part of the tree?
but can you say it is a tree if it has no branches?
the head is only one part of the body,
but can the body live without the head,
or the head without the body?
and the wheel is but a part of the chariot,
and yet without the wheel, the chariot cannot go forward
and yet the wheel alone is a poor conveyance
So each small way is still part of the great way
for the way could not be great
if the small ways did not exist

The water that falls upon the arid plain
was once the water that flowed in waves upon the deep dark sea
the water from the well that you drink with great thirst
the water that flows through the river, rushing down rapids swirling in eddies
the water that is your perspiration, that are your tears
and blood is made up mostly of water, and so is urine and bile

The water locked into the glacial mountain tops
The water crystallized into snow flakes
ice floating upon the deep water of the placid lake
in the dark of December
the icebergs that crash through the narrow straits
upon which the great ships founder
the avalanche, as deadly as a tsunami
and in the void
blown away from the streaming sunlight
glittering in the comet’s tail,
and in the distant unfathomable clouds
where stars are born, deep in that near-infinite void
beyond all human’s ken

• • -

So sunlight and starlight
like impossible furnaces
that burn all the things under heaven
that ignite all the things above the earth
the epitome of the hells
of errant superstition
and yet without their blazing fire
that melts and breaks apart all manner of substance
even metal, even separating the elements of air itself
and without stars fading and dying
exploding cataclysmically
searing all things with light that cannot be seen
the fire of life would not be kindled
we, the children of this universe
are made of stardust

The trackless depths,
even when light no longer illuminates
the human eye
still we can hear the echoes
like waves from the distant past
each peak farther and farther away
each trough deeper and deeper
we can apprehend
the beginning that is perhaps no beginning
the beginning that is perhaps also the ending
though the beginning cannot exist
for all these things to be

For the beginning that we see
cannot be the true beginning
as the setting sun that we watch
has already sunk below the horizon
as when I hear the words that you utter
from your mountaintop
across the valley
you have already started to climb down
is not the echo the thing itself, attenuated?
and if the echo and the thing itself superimpose,
how can you say which is the thing, and which is the echo?

As all the thrumming of a single guitar string
are separate notes that are the same note
as one voice can sing many songs
and many voices can sing as one voice
Isn’t the song also as real as the voices?
For the song must be sung by voices, and
every voice, however hoarse and tuneless, still has its song
and even the mute and the deaf
are not excused from the cacophony
that is the crash and the echo
of the universe in evolution