INACTION: seven poems

1

Magicians say
the great chain must be
joined, or revealed
in its true form
or heard as a whole
monochord vibrating,
there being,
they insist,
no need to climb
or descend only to breath
in and breath out
which we do already

though unconsciously
without knowing
the secret of the
sequence, the significance
of remembering and forgetting
which enshrine the code,
so that when we remember
we need to hear the pull
of forgetfulness and in
forgetting remember.

They say this is all
we need to find,
the necessity of remembering
to forget and forgetting
to remember,
and to be fair
sometimes we do
remember to remember
but then forget to forget.

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2

When something issues forth
from the void, from no visible
or understandable source

we know it is sacred
and immortal, because
having no beginning

it can have no end,
we can easily agree
to this, listening when

we speak or read,
hearing only so far back
before words vaporize.

We hear them issue forth
not seeing or knowing
an end for any let loose

to dance away from us.

=================

3
I watch your words,
the words I read,
skittering through the
maze of my body,
running in erratic spurts,
reaching dead ends,
turning back then
moving on without
finding receptive tissue,
a place to rest.

Minute convulsions,
shake them, they bounce
less jauntily in the
brain than the intestines
their structure roughly parsed
their words re-spelled
their punctuation analysed,
time sucks at them
eventually creates
pellets of memory,
leaves them to atrophy
in contingency store
cupboards.

=======================

4

Perhaps every doing is an undoing,
not in the sense of fate, of ruin,
but in some invisible world
of the undone where whatever we do
undoes a myriad connections.

Just as whatever we say unsays
more than we could list or
suggest intentionally, our
tongues are lawyers that probe,
and burn stubble from fields
from which all sensible mice
have already run.

=================

5

The idea or remembrance of something
outside, beyond, not cosmically
significant, not requiring years of
yoga, or fasting, the ontological
recall of something else
of elseness, of elsnessness,
the emptiness into which
such remembrance can come,
undefined, without specific aim,
the idea or remembrance,
the listening, I forget now
what it was I wanted
or wanted to forget.

=================

6

Now I am nearly
connected
to something.

I feel the hover
of it in the air
I nearly know
how to be here

in relation
to extinction.

=================

7

Is it best to say that
in the ether, in the air itself
are molecules of mercy,

other ways of knowing,

that the divine rushes
like wind across
the grass

find the kindest
delusion and live there
above the flood plane?

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