A Poem: On the Perpetual Motion of the Mind

In writing a form, lush in its recognized transience,

We try to sense the clarity forever falling past us

On a screen of life, love, and wanting. The act itself defies,

Is at once a holding and a release, born of all that is humanity,

Spinning itself out into the dust of the imagined Universe.

We were there once, now we were there again, we will be there,

But it slips into non-existence, a specter that haunts if we pause

To recognize the process of creation. We cup our lost stars briefly

And spill them out on tables, like a rolling of dice.

This is the reality where one of the dice rocks briefly

before it dips into its resting place:

Which is where the painter's hand forgets its motion

And becomes the painting and something previously unimagined is realized.

Which is where bodies rock together, for a moment outside of the realm

Of possibilities, disappearing the mind in shared sensation.

Which is the strangers that are us pausing outside a shop window,

Christmas lights sparkling and reflected back at every possible angle,

But they look past the reflection at emptiness. On either side there is form.

Which is that future where we have been and no longer are.

Which is that moment of dawn when the sky is still yellow around the edges

And the trees are thick black strokes propped on their elbows, blinking

In amazement at the beginning of another decade

in the middle of the clamor bringing in a New Year as it moved us

Into the past, circling the globe, which circles the sun, which circles

Something, like the mind circles, but never returns to quite the same place.

This is letting go of form, a place where words run out of any power

They ever had to describe, and the mind finally rests in the arms of what,

For lack of better words, is everything home has ever meant.