Little Ripples Intersect

Most like a living being

Of all manifestations

Of the inorganic world,

Vaughan Cornish proclaimed the wave.

And maybe that’s all there is

Then, to life, the mystery.

The simile goes both ways.

Finally figure out waves,

Fully understand the waves,

And you’ll solve life in those waves.

You already know it’s both

Whatever it is to be,

Whatever it is can leave.

You already know it shares

This bothness with waves measured.

It’s the bothness you haven’t

Gotten a handle on, yet.

It doesn’t come with handles,

And it’s hard to handle it.

There’s a twoness to oneness

And an absence in between.

It makes you just want to scream.

The scream makes a living wave,

Most like a living being.

Woe to Those Who Grind Lenses for the Soul

Think of it. If atoms split,
Why wouldn’t consciousness nest?
In that case, waking life makes

As much of awareness as
Earth makes of the universe,
An orrery of stories

On a table top atop
A stone, orbiting alone
Around a star, around stars,

Around spiral arms, around
Clusters studding a torus,
A wall of galaxies, all

Aware, too, of awareness—
Which would hold true if you moved
Down into the well, as well,

Telescope turned microscope,
With dream awareness within
Waking, dreams themselves making

Great heaps of dreams within dreams,
Down to wavicles aware
And not aware, not aware

But aware, somehow, down there.
Every waking awareness
That refuses this then is

Pre-Copernican again,
Convinced cycles are circling
Around what’s circling around

In its nest of consciousness,
Of awarenesses aware
Of infinite finities.

That sounds fine, like a good time.
Like mass, at all scales it falls,
But it only hurts on Earth.

Ad Infinitum

Were awareness
Structured the same
As all the rest
Of the cosmos,

Were awareness
Of a chair’s back,
A poem’s refrain,
A patch of sun,

Structured the same
As quantum waves
(Pipe down, Penrose),
As any wave,

You know it would
Scale up the sky
And down to hell,
Invariant.

With No Memory of Anyone Being Here

How many times can the line
Cry out the exact same line
Every time, anaphoric,

Before the power it built
On return, at each return,
Dissipates on returning?

When I return, no one will
Know me, stand waiting for me,
Wander these rooms built for me,

Built for when I would return.
I will find the rooms empty,
Covered in spidery lines

Asking me how many times
Can a line return, crying
For bare rooms built from squared lines?

Tombstone

Life isn’t worth dying for.

Who Is I

One person in a meeting
Asks this of another one
Who spoke somewhere in the room

But sounded disembodied.
Without bodies, anyone
Speaking English could be I.

No matter how old this news,
It still remains unsettling.
No matter how many times,

How easily, you say it,
How swiftly you tap it out,
Your I alone’s never you.

That I, anyone could use,
Narrow door all souls slot through.

Aleph One

Infinity isn’t wrong,
But it isn’t right either.
Nothing gets missed

In surjective
And injective
Bijections, all

Elements paired.
Elsewhere, it gets
Diagonal.

Independence
Doesn’t care for
Functions of pairs.

Doesn’t this feel
A little bit
Like loneliness?

There could be one
Or more in there.
There could be none.

How vast are you,
Infinite one
Of infinites?