The Mote in the Eye
I found this in my notebook. I’m not sure how old it is, but I go through notebooks pretty fast, so I reckon it can’t be more than a year old. I think it had something to do with how when I was young I didn’t understand that human perception was flawed. So I was in awe of the dancing lines, the rolling dots, and crawling bugs.
The circles and spheres are scary.
I didn’t have the vocabulary
when I was five years old,
but now I do.
-
“Singularity.”
It’s a dot, a circle, a sphere.
I’m awake. I sleep in the night.
I am there in the ground,
-
reach for sunlight.
I am crawling through the dirt,
roots snag on my clothes,
rocks bite my skin.
-
I walk through groves
of granite and marble.
Striations and strata
line the wall. The branches
-
tell the story of centuries past.
Hundreds of years compressed in the soil.
I am still searching, sifting through fossils,
I am still looking, relics and fragments.
-
I reconstruct in my
mind and on paper.
Shattered pottery,
the imprint of bones.
-
I redesign
the skeleton
and draw the muscles
and ligaments.
-
“How old?”
I ask “How old?”
What is the age of a world
unknown?
-
The past is forgotten.
The past is long gone.
The world will move on.
It continues forward.
-
The grasshopper
and the flea.
The worm burrows,
wriggling, writhing.
-
Do you see it? It listens still.
Do you hear it? It watches now.
Do you feel it? It breathes
on your neck.
-
It stands here pondering.
I conceive vivid lies.
I walk here wandering.
I imagine designs.
-
A web invisible
to the naked eye.
A pattern invisible
to human minds.
-
Do not consider
nor yet believe.
Forget your thoughts,
and let yourself see.
-
Look, the dead bugs still crawl.
Behold, the lines wave on the wall.
Watch as tiles leap from their place.
And as you stare, what’s left when you wake?
-
It’s as yet a dream,
a dot in your mind.
As yet to be,
the potential, the spark.
-
A mote of creativity
is stuck in your eye.
But what starts as a speck
becomes a beam over time.
-
I am witness of dreams in the night.
I am the jury by which visions are tried.
I am the tower where guardsmen defend.
I am the wall upon which you stand.
-
I crawl. Yes. I crawl.
A snake. A lizard.
I roll like a ball.
I skitter like a spider.
-
I am a fish.
I flow with the sea.
A school of comrades.
A cloister, a colony.
-
Found a new nation.
Watch with delight.
I am the reason
you stay home at night.
-
Numbers?
Wait, what?
The ground is cold.
It’s like a free…
-
wait, what am I saying?
I feel odd.
Both cold and hot.
An uneven temperature.
-
You shake with the wind.
You are tossed by the breeze.
You swim with the fish.
You drown in the seas.
-
I hear victory in the East,
yet I dread the future.
Why can’t I be here and now?
Why can’t I be patient?
-
English. An imperfect language.
I sympathize with the writer,
whose inscriptions complain
of the restrictions of mortal words.