Kenophilia

It comes and goes. The days go by.
The angel of self-consciousness
Suspends its blue-black flame of thought,
A flickering, wingless teardrop,
A methane marsh-light in the mind,
A weightless, lightless waste that shines
In any kind of dark or light—

Funny epiphenomenon,
Little gleaming bit of dreaming
That requires a human body,
Human sensory system hooked
Into the radiant network
Of language’s whispering ghosts,
The self-transcending, self-disclosed.

Swamp angel, it only exists
When nothing’s needed and consists
Of instantaneous stillness.
It is like some magical moth,
Soft, capable of hovering
Against gravity without wings,
But elusive, not illusion.

Achievement has no part in it.
Attending to it removes it.
If the reflection from your eyes
Cast a spot of light on the wall
And you cut your eyes to see it,
It could never be what you saw.
It lives in what flesh makes of it.

Awareness, effortless demon,
Comes from muck, is flushed from the dust,
And nothing can be done with it.
It flutters, powerless effect,
Never transcending creation,
And yet it arrives from the skies,
Or seems to, holy by descent.

When I allowed I might go on
When everyone of worth was lost,
When I had no means or reason
Left, without having met my death,
Still somehow savoring being,
I felt the freedom in my chest
And glimpsed it in the emptiness.