But have you ever known a night with an unabashed grin, with a laughter that emerges from your chest in delicate bubbles to catch the red-green-yellow of the streetlights or the neon marquee flashing bright and lovely; the velvet maroon of new dark wraps around you and your hands rise above you as if they know no gravity and the kick of the bass electrifies the marrow inside you, something reaching out, kicking back? Have you ever known a night that slips over you quietly like a gentle suffocation, or like a small mercy, and births you fresh and quick like stars so when morning comes you remember the simple miracle of light?
So there are the clouds, forgetting to make rain. So there is the sky and its unseeing eye. I can’t remember the good things, because I like to let the plosive and melodious words slip through my loose fists like dust. Vicious, I peel back my eyelids and my skin, fevered with nightmare sweat. I am afraid. Maybe there is a white-eyed truth inside me, a blank-faced truth, a truth cool and slight as smoke, but I worship a god made of too much gravity and of mirrors that stretch and skew and laugh at me. My reflection is a cruel parody and I know enough to know she's not truth. She's the Descartesian malicious demon, pushing me to doubt. Pushing me off into a sea of unanswered questions chasing answers around the circles of whirlpools until I'm drowning in uncertainty. When I'm coughed back up, in the mirror is me looking into a mirror in which I am looking into a mirror in which I am looking into a mirror and ad infinitum. Thoughts like that make me queasy.
Remember that rhyme and the never ending cycles of infinity get squeezed into a pocket sized poem. Rhetoric for recovery. Still, there's not any kind of truth in word play or following the sentence down the garden path, and nothing to find when you get to the end either. If I could decide that my truths would only have to be abstractions, I could roll up the map, call an end to the search. But regardless, I'd still be seeking out more, surreptitiously, in the corners of bus stops, between the volumes in bookshops, underneath bronzing leaves. We're all doing it. We're all hungry for something to bite down on. A concrete thing. It's probably why we developed our own metrics for measuring truth and decided upon its parameters- what is and what isn't; what's good and what's bad; what's right and what's wrong; what's worthwhile and what is not. True, false- we say we can tell you which, with our measurements and our observations. Nobody ever reads the footnotes to you. I just figured it out later- these measurements were designed and constructed entirely by humans to determine the standards by which we can determine the truth. But if we made the rulers, aren't we making up the answers?
Fighting with thoughts like this, about the whole psychosphere of human certainty and scientific knowledge. Scientists are hungry because they know it too. They know nothing can be empirically proven, because they decided in the first place that it could be. They know that all they have decided is significant or factual to this day could easily be dismembered in the same way that faith can, if they were just to alter their scales a little more. Adjust the standard deviation cut-off point. Temper with the p value by only 0.01 percent. If that were to happen, nothing we had shown to be conclusive even with the most robust findings could suddenly be- what? A fabrication? An illusion? Scientists know they will never get to the end on their quest for answers, but they keep questioning and keep doubting, and the circle returns again.
Hungry for still glass and bright lights, my truth is my body, heavy as a gravestone. This petrifies. Would I find more comfort in believing what I fall back into doing so, frequently- that my body and mind are not connected and my body is just a vessel for my mind to float around in. When I feel for my body, all I want to do is get rid of it.
Snap my neck down, chin to chest. Sew my eyes shut.
Give me a nameless face. Give me a sickness of anonymity.
A circle's round- it has no end; that's how long I want to be your friend.
Remember that rhyme and the never ending cycles of infinity get squeezed into a pocket sized poem. Rhetoric for recovery. Still, there's not any kind of truth in word play or following the sentence down the garden path, and nothing to find when you get to the end either. If I could decide that my truths would only have to be abstractions, I could roll up the map, call an end to the search. But regardless, I'd still be seeking out more, surreptitiously, in the corners of bus stops, between the volumes in bookshops, underneath bronzing leaves. We're all doing it. We're all hungry for something to bite down on. A concrete thing. It's probably why we developed our own metrics for measuring truth and decided upon its parameters- what is and what isn't; what's good and what's bad; what's right and what's wrong; what's worthwhile and what is not. True, false- we say we can tell you which, with our measurements and our observations. Nobody ever reads the footnotes to you. I just figured it out later- these measurements were designed and constructed entirely by humans to determine the standards by which we can determine the truth. But if we made the rulers, aren't we making up the answers?
Fighting with thoughts like this, about the whole psychosphere of human certainty and scientific knowledge. Scientists are hungry because they know it too. They know nothing can be empirically proven, because they decided in the first place that it could be. They know that all they have decided is significant or factual to this day could easily be dismembered in the same way that faith can, if they were just to alter their scales a little more. Adjust the standard deviation cut-off point. Temper with the p value by only 0.01 percent. If that were to happen, nothing we had shown to be conclusive even with the most robust findings could suddenly be- what? A fabrication? An illusion? Scientists know they will never get to the end on their quest for answers, but they keep questioning and keep doubting, and the circle returns again.
Mirror, mirror on the wall- tell me something true about it all?
Mirrors, windows, the doors of perception,
an elaborate ruse or means of deception,
but one simple thing a person understands
is the truth they see when looking at their hands.
Whether we are illusions or shadows that fall
as Plato saw reality upon his cave wall
or whether something else, you'll truly find
you think and you are: your body and your mind.
Hungry for still glass and bright lights, my truth is my body, heavy as a gravestone. This petrifies. Would I find more comfort in believing what I fall back into doing so, frequently- that my body and mind are not connected and my body is just a vessel for my mind to float around in. When I feel for my body, all I want to do is get rid of it.
Snap my neck down, chin to chest. Sew my eyes shut.
Give me a nameless face. Give me a sickness of anonymity.