Lines Between Lines Beyond

~Your Paths Led Here

All of them. Always. Driven

Through the night sky by the wind.

On the water. Overland.

Not intending to arrive.

A room could hold far travel.

A cave. A bed. Crania.

Wake up. Your paths have led here.

Look back. The paths are changing—

No intention to arrive—

To lead to what keeps changing

Such as hunger as a fact.

Such as never going back.

Nothing you experience

Ever goes exactly back.

~Antinomy in Antimony

Behind my raccoon-like eyes

Peering from far mining towns,

Middle of nowhere, Utah,

Potential infinities

Keep intuition churning

Through provincial vortices—

May the part have the power

Of the whole? May the longer

Line contain not one more point

Than the shorter? If so, then

What lies between and what lies

Beyond? Time is essential

To one camp of accountants.

Time does not exist, insists

A mass of cosmologists.

Maybe kohl holds so much lead

Thought grows intoxicating

Among these desert hermits—

Or maybe it made our eyes

Freer of free-rider germs

Nearer muddy reservoirs.

Fog upon fog. Unity

Sounds ethical, noble, but

Twoity ridiculous,

And yet my addled instincts

Tend to the duplicitous—

Math begun in perception

Of the difference that changes

Again and again, tricky

Twoness, like a pair of eyes,

What we can see of the world.

Digital orthography

Jumps around analogy—

If the word all is to be

Used at all, we need to see

Beyond continuity

And discontinuity

To—what? Not unity, not 

Twoity, antinomies 

Of Antimony. There is

No good name for what we know—

Continuous disruption,

Smoothly fractured history.

We try anyway. Language

Both our digits and the moon.

Coyote was a good name

For a town in this country.

Catch a few coyote pups—

Call it a place. The miners

Should have left it Coyote—

Character testimony.

Antimony. Tricky words.

Antinomy. Free riders

On the windblown desert waves.

~The Law of the Exclusive Middle

In the middle of true and false

The whole world naps in a hammock

A fracture sleeping in a sling

To heal, to never be the same

Bivalent proposition knots

Tie the hammock to twin pillars

One called knowledge, the other life

Large and shady and suspicious 

I suspect neither one exists

In the discrete sense naming gives

But if either one is cut down

Or shaken too hard the world slips

No, we don’t want the world to slip

Experience is hard enough

The shocks that make us break in two

That make us see the world in two

Here, fold this blanket in your past

It will keep you warm while you heal

You were only ever middle

Gravity, absence, stars, and you

~Devotional Nihilism

Faiths have been constructing gods

From nothing for so long now

Names too sacred to pronounce

I figured, hell, might as well

Go all out, go whole hog treat

Nothing as the name of God

~Anticipation Recollected in Tranquility 

I have a proposition—

Call it radical, goofy,

Counterintuitive, daft,

Ignorant, arrogant, weird,

Or ignore me completely—

The future does not exist.

The future will not exist.

Future never existed

Beyond our ideas of it,

One of our human notions

Evolved from adaptations

Serving animal functions,

Such as the capacity

To anticipate changes

Based on patterns of changes,

A workaround for the lag 

Between sensing, processing,

And reacting to changes—

Always already happened—

Which resemble what happened

On previous occasions,

Instincts elaborated

Over the generations

Of ancestral languages

Into tensed syntax, stories

Projecting the past forward,

Divinations, predictions,

Armories of orreries,

Star charts, armillary spheres,

Computer simulations.

We’re good at predicting things,

Great at predicting some things.

But none of it’s the future.

The past is never the same,

Not instantaneously,

And must be constantly scanned,

But there’s no future in it.

Of all of our fantasies

Of magic and deities,

Monsters, fairies, aliens,

Worlds in other galaxies,

Our own immortality,

No bubble is emptier

Than our cosmos of future.

What is is always what was—

Insofar as anything

Has any reality

The future doesn’t. You’ll see.

~To Face the Blank Notebook

Is there anything we know

For certain? That’s the alpha

And omega for the sage.

Well, then. I don’t think I am.

Right in the middle for me,

Muddle in the middle me.

You laugh. Shrug. Smirk. Roll your eyes.

But how do you know I am?

Why do I pretend you care?

I’m reasonably certain

That ideas thread tapestry

Through fingers they leave behind.

I’m reasonably certain

That language, that words, like these,

Live there, and you among them.

But this is all long done now.

I used to collect notebooks,

Habit close to addiction.

I still get a bit twitchy

Near racks of stationery,

Blank daybooks, journals, moleskins.

But the blank is perfection,

And my notes were corruption.

I failed and began again,

Until I had shelves of them,

The sullied and the pristine.

I felt safer on napkins,

Envelopes, tickets, receipts,

Backs of old photocopies

From forgotten class sessions,

Or on the weird palimpsests 

Of glowing, smirking screens built

From glass, carbon composites,

Whole periodic tables

Of rare and heavy metals.

How was paper more precious?

Too easy to mess, I guess.

No, I am damned if I face

A blank notebook. I am not

Certain of anything yet,

Not when the world hides itself

As itself and then changes

Back into itself again,

So that what I was I am,

Engine centered in engines.

~The Disheveled Angels of Revelation 

There’s never just one butterfly.

Who knows which wings tipped the sequence

That led us to the hurricane,

Butterflies crushed against downed trees?

We are most impressed by knowledge

Of methods we don’t understand.

It’s what keeps mysticism, faith,

And revelation in the game,

Although math almost always wins.

We are a world always ready

For harvesting. Visions and proofs,

Sickles and scythes, reapers with wings.

~Prediction Horizon

Time without cause. Fantasy,

Dread, and the future, those three

Pathogens of calm moments,

Those wraiths—They’re not in the wind,

Not even in the chorus

Of canyon katabatics

And the short-lived waterfalls

That together form one voice

On a wet spring afternoon

When no one is up this high

Where the snow still mixes in

With the waterfalls and wind.

An honest, shushing chorus,

A breathing without language

Without any thoughts at all,

Is welcome at any time,

Always welcome in the mind

That thinks through time without cause.