All of it.
The ground bleeds, pouring—feeding the hungry seas;
Draining like semen, seeding their fertile ovum.
They dance drunk on the blood of the mountains,
Foaming, frothing at the mouth—even as they conceive,
And their womb, pregnant once again,
Rolls, kicks, and leaps for joy.
The earth weeps; shedding its salts like tears.
They coalesce, forming streams, flowing down
Through the winding hills, browned by the marrow of its bones,
Which leak their sorrow, dissolving in the salt—
As withered leaves fall into a wind of no return.
At their feet, sandy lake beds sitting dry
Are wet with the stains of red raw mineral,
As rare as life itself.
They let out a sigh of insatiable thirst,
Only to breathe in again on their cigars—
Their pipes draining tannin into their tributaries.
What we have left, we would have lost long ago.
The seas would by now be a salty stew,
Loaded with our wears—all our cares, both rarified and raw.
Our mountains would be level, worn to a plain,
And barren desert we would be—bare and deserted.
The desolation none could bear, but we would—
We forever would;
Would be destroyed,
And yet we would be forever being—
Forever being destroyed in perpetuity—
Continuing to continue and yet being more worn down
With ever-increasing degree of finality,
Where even the most minute infinitesimal remains
Would still be subject to further entropy;
Eroding still with a half-life that ticks like a clock
Into an eternity of decay without end.
Be it not for the water, we would not be here at all;
Be it not for the water,
We would not be bleeding red into the ocean ether.
It cuts us to the core;
Even our stone is sliced in two with time.
Be it not for more than the mere water
That washes our lives clean of their corruption,
What we have left we would have lost long ago.
Our lives mingle only remnants of the past;
Countless cataclysmic catastrophes
Have accumulated over time out of mind—
Beyond comprehension,
A treasure trove so vast,
We have forgotten the horde we walk upon.
Times of tragedy, of cruel trial,
And great tribulation above reckoning.
They sickened us to the core, to the root,
With a sickness so thick it stuck to us;
We became heavy with such a weight of sorrow,
We suffered distress beyond stress.
The mountains, moaning under the height,
Under skies pouring sleet
And hailing trials on every square mile,
Rolled over, moving from their ancient resting place.
And pierced in their own souls by a sword lying silent at their side,
They writhed in rage and, like a lake of fire lies dormant no longer, erupted,
Vomiting up their filth—
Filling our blackened days with sulfuric air,
Raining sulfur and care—
Stinging our skin,
Burning us white with acid wash—whiter than wool, like snow.
Pain shot through my back and wracked my neck;
Staggering, my head, wrapped in despair, wandered hopelessly.
And losing my footing, it wrecked itself on a rock,
In a wrath of madness,
And a seizure ceased—and took us.
We almost died; how I survived, I do not know.
That I awoke from my swoon, I assume.
I had hit no wall,
Though a wall had fallen and felled me.
And I see—the critical journey is me.
Prostrate, I lay—
Head covered in ash.
There I stayed, lying in the waste,
Wasted by grief at the loss of more than light.
Hope had vanished like the weakening glow
Of a match snuffed cold by a strong wind.
I pulled sackcloth to clothe my stinging skin,
To save my starving body from lying naked
On naught else but what bare rock can tell—
If it would speak of it.
But thank God, it will not speak of it.
I now understand it. All of it. Only now.
I see it all. Now I see. Now I understand.
I don’t understand that I do understand, but I do.
I don’t stand under anything except the infinite height
Above my head, heavy with the weight of the magnitude of it all.
I look up and see nothing I stand under,
But I know; now I see.
Where is the tree where we can stand and agree,
You and I, together?
We need to see;
In satori, be.
There is no tree,
Or at least not one that I foresaw;
Yet now I foresee—
Everything has happened just as I had not perceived it.
Is there a tree we can stand under and agree?
I understand; I don’t understand.
I have not understood at all,
And yet now here I am.
I now understand—
As if I had always understood—
Under the standing of what has stood before—
Who has always stood before me—
Under whom I am found in his eyes.
A foundling, by him; in him.
Things continue at the margins of change.
Seedling spring up.
Like saplings, we feed on the inflow
Or we wither in a stagnant pool of isolation.
Without turnover, we will be lost—or already are.
When rivers run backwards as the tide comes in,
Dying things discontinue, and saving things remain—
Bringing change in perpetuity.
This fluctuation exists at the very fabric of space itself—
And time.
In a constant field,
Constant at every point with change;
A vacuum full of moments and anti-movements,
Creating both the momentum and the meaning of it all;
And it was not void.
The Wind of God flutters over the waters still;
Still they move.
Nothing is not stable;
Nor is it able.
It cannot continue—
No single point or particle sits still or remains;
It is a restless universe.
The mountains move; the seas displace.
The change maintains; the decay creates.
The continuum turns; the straight reverses.
The line is the way, but pray—
Circle back and find the way.
The one universal constant holding everything together
Is a finely tuned capacity rippling at every point and moment
To bring change—to bring life,
And life within life.
It is this vibration at the level of the very foundation
Of the fabric of materiality itself
That is constant everywhere.
The living will live, and the dying will die.
Beyond change or beneath it,
Things cease to exist in a spiral,
Never-ending downward—
Which is the black hole at the centre of physicality itself.
Reality is a hell for the unturning—
In every moment of deterioration,
Owing solely to the changelessness of a soul
Bent on staying put; not moving—
Not letting go of the dead weight that pulls on our being,
Like gravity itself.
To let go and give up what we cannot keep
Is a crisis of turmoil so tumultuous,
It is a vortex of turbulence so torturous
Our very souls are in upheaval.
It is in the eddy currents we are saved;
Salvation flows.
Beneath a tree, the Tree.
At Mamre is where we begin—
Where it all began.
In Abraham, who stood there under,
Though he could not stand.
There, under, he stood, though he did not understand.
Seeding our faith with a hand, he agreed.
A promise not by him was made—
One he could not keep.
A covenant of grace; for him, it was made.
He did not speak, nor did he open his mouth.
He slept in a swoon.
And it was done.
Out of Ur of the Chaldeans, from Uruk of all,
His idols of old, buried in the cold earth,
He turned.
He left and went, knowing not the way.
Letting go of his own, his home,
He set out alone.
A new fertile crescent lay anew in his flesh.
An agreement for renewal was confirmed by a word:
All things will be made new in him,
In that one and new beginning.
The blood of that mountain falls downward as seed.
The ground is uprooted and cast into the sea.
The tree is no longer. And jubilee, here under we stand.
Wafting into the womb of the virgin
he came;
The seed in hand, in Abraham—
The woman, her seed
he became in her flesh
(the stump in the land: the tree raised up a man)—
And the wind of God was over the waters of her womb,
where he spoke: “Let dry land appear.”
And it was so;
A child born father.
Everlasting father.
For to us this child was given.
And behold, no semen had spurned—no sperm had stained!—this offspring come;
The Spirit inlaid.
But a bruising enmity lay in her veins.
And being now come,
now coming,
overshadowing Eve,
this Spirit-man—
as Able was slain
by Cain and the serpent who lied—
was pierced through his side,
and creation died:
Turning the tide;
And the rivers ran back,
And the ocean cried!
And flooding water met with his blood—
and mingled and merried and met with the mud.
And they danced down streams on heights above high.
And flowing out from that mountain of madness sublime,
reddened black, yet whitening up the day,
with a brightness that, bleaching the light,
spread its seed, pouring out like semen,
and filling our barrenness dry,
they fed our insatiable seas,
full and fertile and fat indeed.
And the wind,
coming down from that mountain,
overshadows my soul;
It is the same word of old.
And my waters teem fresh,
alive, and whole.
I stand on the edge of the world and the seas;
On the margin, at the hole.
This is me, and I’m free.
Now I see, only now,
in this eros of time—
These despotic of times.
And now, still the wind,
is fluttering over the seas;
his seed flows,
and the face of the waters will not be still.
They will move.
But this time—
this erotic of kinds;
I’m mesmeric—
It’s mesmerotic in my mind!
