words

The pain and the pressure. I awake each morning slowly, photons swirling in the canyons of my eyes, unfurling like a flower stretching toward the sun. I arise with a gentle purpose, a slight agency. My son rests a little longer, I sit in the morning light and watch the dew dissipate from the grass into the atmosphere. I feel only the pressure of the air as weather systems birth and perish in a breath, frantic like gas giants, frictionless like the cold reality of Neptune. Everything is exactly as it should be on the ground, at gravity’s dominion, and there is no time to worry about time, no rush, no fear, no shame, no guilt, no regret. All past moments are present in accordance with universal law, the sum of all previous waves present in this forward power. I write words as they leak from my mind, fulfilling whatever agreement my blood has made with those who came before to document and drive this engine onward, ever onward, this ancestral debt urging me to etch our collective existence into the stone of time. There are no towers wavering on the edge of architectural failure, no transmitters fluctuating and clawing at the electromagnetic spectrum’s strict laws. I close my eyes and still the photons flood the deep wells of my ocular cavities, swimming, like ancient fish, early lifeforms pure in nature and void of a prefrontal cortex, the first vertebrates discovering another dimension outside the water’s surface. There is no need for any chemical assistance, the brain and the mind working in tandem, parlaying peace against all odds. My son awakens and I feel his footfall upon the laminate flooring as he bounds through the house searching for me, fearlessly, as if it were all a game, every morning, noon and night a game with no stakes, winners or losers, a game simply existing for the sake of itself, its own calculus imprinted upon our little orbital lives. He finds me and we embrace, all smiles, laughter, sheer joy in this extraction of now. We paint, we play, we exist separately and together. There is no fury but for the raging of the cosmos, the physics of the system sustaining this moment, all memories combine effortlessly, endlessly, a serpent devouring its own tail, but no urgent feeling of failure or loss, no fear. No fear except that this will end, and even that is a distant vibration, the secret truth of everything, that all things end with or without our consent, and the light waxes and wanes but is always present, warm, welcoming, near and far, a soft embrace guiding us toward the horizon, toward each and own our zenith and our terminus. Night falls like a curtain, the stars erupt simultaneously and we retreat to our horizontal positions to maintain equilibrium, our bodies freeze as we dream like beings made from fables, hours of silence as we face the causeways of our lives unconsciously, safely, softly, before the cycle repeats. 

2023sm