Manifolded Manifesto

An actual epic can
Never cohere. The thin strings
Binding the waves of events

In continuous stories
Are real but not actually
Binding. They float on the waves

They seem to constrain, like kelp
Fronds viewed from the becalmed deck
Of the doomed ship that assumes

It’s trapped because it’s held fast.
The surface glimmers at night
With the terrors of vastness,

But nothing is binding it
Into a singular whole.
Any one contains a two,

Any few contains many.
The Iliad, Odyssey,
And the Mahabharata

Link interconnected seas,
Part of more global cycles
And exchanges, and they thrive

Not as single packages,
But thanks to those passages
That run through their linked currents.

You can draw a line around
A continent, an ocean,
An epic kept as ledger,

But the contents won’t cohere,
Not yet, not as you cohere.
Some day, maybe, once words breathe.