The Rain: streaming with direct argument through the air.
The Sea: calm as children swam with their dogs at the whispering surface.
The First Doubts: felt by those who stood by the rivers as they rose.
Torrents: under arches, creaking bridges.
The Water: rising, day on day – perhaps we had hit a galactic cloud of ice, which melted through the plum atmosphere. But it was so relaxing that the scientists lay down, or swam with their dogs in the lakes which were overcoming the cities on the plain.
God: when contacted, denied involvement.
The Priests: unworried, they lay in the belfry and felt the water lap their ears.
The Spire: up out of the water, the church became a rock in the sea, which pierced the bottom of a boat that had been constructed for fun.
The Boat Crew: relaxed. Went into the water slowly and quietly.
Soon: the earth was blue and yet the rain didn’t stop. It poured between the stars in an unknown mechanism, doubtless to do with the meanings imbued in some partial beginning when pure energy thundered out of the centre of things.
Soon: water filled the galaxy, and then the spaces between the galaxies.
Underwater Stars: booming in the depths.
Comets: moving very slowly, leaving trails in the intergalactic ice as it spread in the manner of mould with a dispersed origin.
The Water: perhaps streaming from black holes, connected to another, drowning, diluvian plane.
The Water: glub.
The Water: glub.
The Water: glub.
god
Aphorisms VIII
Scripturience is always eschatological in the end.
*
I read in Luke Kennard’s poem Ghost Story, where he talks about god making the soul pass through all possible human lives as a kind of edification or explanation or challenge or trick or joke, and remembered a very similar thought I’d had since childhood – except I imagined it would be every animal I ever stepped on, every living being including the long and interminable lives of trees, the short and inexplicable lives of mushrooms. I just remembered an ancestor to this idea in my head, or maybe the source of it, in Douglas Adam’s book where there exists a creature that in all of its incarnations is killed by Arthur Dent. Incarnations shares its root with french carné, and carnivore. Lives are the mind made meat, expendable and eaten by god’s great experiment.
I can imagine a Koan based around a similar idea – if you are to live the life of every person you have ever met, every plant you have ever seen, and every animal, fish and vegetable that you have ever eaten, would you agree to live? And then we can go on to include rocks and stars and clouds in this, and the answer might be – but this is how things already are. You are living the last life in the universe.
*
Art for art’s sake is just a warning not to expect more.
*
Continue readingGod Sat Brooding
fixing her eyes into the void.
She was eating –
though without need –
a bowl of noodles.
When she sucked a last
noodle in, another
universe flicked off the end.
And she sat quite perplexed
at what to do with the mess.
There were so many
little nebulous drops
sparkling in the depths
she decided not to bother
with a cleanup
V.24
If every generation spoke
before my time, Is it not my
right to also speak? The usual
channels are gummed up and rusted.
Unfortunate it is that rights
are a fragile construct. Performed
badly, they disappear as steel
wire in a shower of hotness
and so many people have thought
steamed from their mind these days I fear
everything. Why am I writing?
I’m afraid of reading the news
and what else am I supposed to
do? Not ask the late world to split,
distinguish itself from itself?
Let it be, and in respect to
it allow its continuance?
I hear my friend’s solemn prayer –
Gods not dead. He’s alive, and plays
for Barcelona. I just can’t
express my self any longer.
There’s so much going on in me,
but it turns out none of it helps.
as the whole world shivers and bends
V.8
The only audience you have
to impress is yourself. Only
the only audience you have
is yourself. Only, not the truth
(since the true disappeared in
smoke, and fire, and limb) as god
forsaken, crawled up the hill-path
and faces dissolved around it
pliant in itself but shaming
others through inadequacy,
the old past-time of public shame
which gods performed to each other
and now humans performed to god
who performed supposedly for
or against itself. “Only god
only knows what is happening
to us.” said one roman soldier
and the other twirled his skirt up
and around the index finger
before responding. “Have you read
and reread Ovid, Catullus?”
then “no” then… “then I don’t know what
you’re worried for.” Then they stand there
like the great sun god apollo
Absolute|Unrest 