If Wishes Were Horses

November 11, 1997
(last edited on April 7, 2006)

How can I hope to explain it?
Feelings,
a new understanding?
To you;
how can I hope to explain it to you?
Why can I hope?
Because I need to;
because—
if I could explain why I wouldn’t need to.

Here I am.
There you are—
and what greater barrier could there be
than half the distance to communion?
One of us, and the other—
how artificial.
What boundaries we invent to make sense
and rid our minds of an incoherent rabble.

A point where you end and I begin?
A point where anything ends and another one thing begins?
Nature molded our minds to think in a logic
that She Herself is permitted to defy.
Time Himself mocks humanity
for our inability to comprehend their four dimensions.

Objects, and not events?;
things, and not dynamics?;
we are indeed worthy of ridicule.

“You” breathe, and “you” sustain “your life.”
“You” look, and “you” shall see.
Not the slightest of breath
nor the subtlest of thoughts
occur in a vacuum;
look through the lens and the empty spaces disappear.

Human or nature?;
the question has only one answer:
yes,
and the barriers are the mischievous jokes
of a Mistress who contains lives, hopes, dreams,
matter, and energy,
and is Herself none of these.

Seriously, we take these carbon bags of water
and pretend that there are answers,
and presuppose the pretension that there are questions.
Decartes tells us that we are that we think,
yet it is not ‘til we think that we realize
the doubt.

I am here; you are there;
A conflux of matter and energy zipped together,
and one conflux totally sovereign from another?
An electron with a brain would find that funny.
I would find it funny that it would consider itself
an electron with a brain,
and not a brain with an electron—
that is how mine works.
Does a photon care if the sight it illuminates
is the littered carcasses of the last battlefield of human ingenuity?
Is nuclear war anything more than urban renewal for what makes us?

So connected, so much a cell in an organism,
so integrated into the indivisibility of Gaia,
and so lonely, so cut off.
So individual.
And here I am, and there you are.
I wish I could tell you.
But there you are.