THESE MAPS, THESE ROADS
These maps, these roads, written and rewritten word on word.
Size and distance, though, these are not to be measured.
The roads and maps are real but travelled, somehow,
By ships that fly, by pigs that speak, by horses
That move and yet not move.
The shape of words – that is the key
To all that is and is not.
The holy lines that sum up all dimensions,
That lie so perfectly,
That birth sound out of silence and void.
Chase the edge of one thing, the infinite borders,
The central compass points.
Trace with keen fingertips the way they merge and separate.
The same pattern is in the whorls of your hand and always has been.
The world is measured by its forgetfulness.
The eternal is uncovered by those with perfected memory.
No words left orphaned, no thought muddied or misplaced.
A perfect fractal prison of a million voices,
Laying down the roads and all the maps.
Remembering, remembering, it is all remembering.
Beyond the gods and monsters
There is a perturbation of light and shadow.
Beyond light and shadow, a flickering notion of this and that.
Beyond this and that, a line of movement and a point of stillness.
A certain chain of gravity, (that is love and jealousy),
And a flow of iron-grey chains.
The roads, the winds of space, move along,
The paths of gods and worlds dreaming,
Dreaming they have time and space and something,
Something else, a name, a reason, a future, a history.
A certain trajectory, a ricochet away into story.
New words, same roads, same houses, new owners,
Same walls, same ghosts, same roads, new roads,
New names.
—
simonhlilly 