WHAT IT SHOULD BE
Does it, (pay attention,) does it,
Even when become a stream continuous and downward,
Does it lope back to steady prose, pedantic, precise, nonedescript ?
Or else might it wend songly and weirdly woven
Painted true but in madman’s colours, seen from mirror’s view,
Haunted, glanced at the corner of the eye,
Dancing words, rolled, roiling words,
Words that spurt fountains unbidden but shaped from
The lips of stone gods.
We are all here short moments in the moment of time
Gliding darkest matter on pools of spinning light.
We are voiceless until breath finds shape.
Voiceless until we sing sprouted feelings.
The heart, it is not a steady thing.
It is a giddy thing, a butterfly, birdsong thing,
A river thing losing itself babbling wilder gestures.
That it makes no sense, that it fills itself to bursting,
That it runs hands full and scattering meanings,
That it reaches and fails and reaches and finds something else,
That it is not music, that is is not is not music,
A tamping scuffling rhythm in dust, a dance becoming,
A mouth dance, a tongue drum, a skirl, a pibroch, a lament,
An imitation of storms in the mountains,
An imitation of the mist cleared by slow spreading sunlight
An imitation of the meld, the mix, the utterance, the name.
A dipping down to the roots of water, to the mud, to the squirming.
Entangled. Neither one this, nor the other, that.
Turning inside out to find to find what brings it all together.
What enables utter forgetfulness of edges, renames the names.
It is what prayer should be, what gods recognise as their own spark,
Generation unto generation, world without end.
