The Special Relativity of Consciousness
There is a man falling from the sky.
I am serious. He is carrying a photon clock
and the light inside is stretching
the duration of a second. The speed of light.
We know this from Einstein’s theory
of special relativity. I told you
I am being serious. Nearby, a spaceship
carrying an octopus calculates
the mathematical ‘event’: the velocity,
the effect of gravity, how it works against
the delay in his data reduction, frustrated
like the beginning students of physics.
We error because we will the machinery.
Einstein, Newton, and Maxwell
we’re concerned with consciousness
(I place no fault on desire, these men
see through diamonds I covet). Rather,
my concern is with tragedy for the falling
man, his mind stunned against the purple
night. Why whales were considered
by the poet of Pittsburgh and I, the poet,
still unknown, consider at all. We must
surrender to the mistake of our temporality,
the secular mishap between space and time
of consciousness, where miracle and accident
give birth. It is here we must fashion homes
through the burning wonder of our being.
Theory is enough. Elizabeth said
the Spanish word for breasts is chichi
and I told her it was tetas and we agreed
on multiplicity of definition. We agreed
we knew too much. Even if she could not
see the falling man crashing onto a faint star
and closer, the octopus in raw amazement.
She chose to notice the winter's dew
growing on dandelions. We each are
moved by what the mind and the heart
fashion in and out of that strange fire.
Ecstatic Acquiescence
Poetry. A kind of superficial getting to. Truth and
wisdom:
fleeting magic. This sky and a splash of evening.
The ecstatic dose for an acquiescence of something
lost.
We are constantly searching for the next great fix.
Jeffers
finding salvation in rock. My father in the breaking
down and
rebuilding of his flesh. Cioran in denouncing the vessel
that allowed him the ability to denounce that vessel.
We must
remember:
it is for having been. Whatever amount that is in brief.
Getting to
the fringe of things. Consciousness demands that we
pay attention
and partake. Even if our mad instincts amount
to little
or no
great enhancement of the human condition.
Diogenes Spotted in Humboldt Park
Socrates gone mad, they say.
He who makes his home
in a pithos of ash and bone
from evening into night. He
who speaks with the scurry
and orchestra in Elm trees,
who tell him of the people’s
confusion. The strangers
who ask him for his place
of residence and its whereabouts.
They who will say of his living
is dogged and then they
who restrain the primordial
soul: Plato interested in theories
of form. The man beautiful
beaten by the hard sun,
walking the barren field
towards an unknown paradise.
Followed by the faint smell
of piss and rich earth.
No stranger to these cosmos.