But what’s it about?
It’s about smelling flowers
whose perfume shivers the mind.
It’s about being a flower
whose fragrance drifts freely
to any who choose to smell.
It’s about shootin’ the blues
like a bad-town stringy haired
drug user lookin’ for a
quick and easy feeling.
It’s about eating diamonds
even if your teeth are gone
because you didn’t floss
after every full meal deal.
It’s about flavorful spectrums
and what’s found at each end
of the rainbow;
like how many hot peppers
you can have on a hotdog.
It’s about ugliness and beauty
or the way you might feel if
you looked into the eyes
of your child who intentionally
killed a younger sibling.
It’s about the questions
children ask over and over,
and the answers adults give
to explain why, and why not.
It’s about good stories that
are bold, and well told in
books that are read twice.
It’s about changes that
always happen but which
never escape the ‘if-then loops’
of history and human nature.
It’s about billions of mirrors
walking around showing each
other many lies and some truth;
which no one believes since
nothing can be seen with
our own eyes alone.
It’s about never knowing
what another person thinks,
or even what one person thinks.
It’s about balance. Impossible
ever essential equilibrium.
Not like what keeps planets
in motion, but more like
how to sit on a teeter-totter
so that no one’s feet touch
soiled and solid ground.
It’s about a black marble
David making love to Mona Lisa
in the shadow of the Sphinx’s nose;
while Ahab satellites search the
seas for the last white whale.
It’s about being water in a
universe of chemicals whose
combined purpose is to defy
gravity for some space and time;
like the way a tree, or a building
stands up from the ground, or
the way a baby cries and punches
it’s arms and legs upward
after leaving the inner
buoyancy of its mother.
It’s about knowing, or not
knowing God, and whether
desire is the nose ring of
humanity which we use to
lead ourselves to sin, or salvation.
It’s about starting and ending
simply after wrestling complexity.
It’s about an eleventh commandment.
“Thou shall cease to be human.”
It’s not finished yet, but so far it’s good.