Line by line

Life unfolds this way,

the face now resembles our grey matter

what is inside comes out.

The clouds will unravel again,

you can hear the wind 

moving them along.
I am done
telling others to listen.

Paper, then. My life. Drawn to fire.

All those the people carrying dead burdens
on their cracking lips.

They burned books
into their memories and cauterized the wounds

with chanting and invocations

shaped to sound like smoke rings

they read the signs.

As with people and colors
they gather but do not become,
one another,
as with clouds, the heaviest fall
and we say we needed rain.

In these conditions

the symbols bleed together

and it is red
Open.




Painting by Emile Claus, c. 1898, 'Ampelio, old fisherman of Bordighera', in [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Layman terms

A single handful
of random people
really
understand astrophysics-
particularly excluding women
that choose cosmetology
over cosmology-
when trying to turn back time.

Look inside the steeple,
only this many people
read poetry.
They gather to create volume-
mass,
in order to absorb the familiar
echoes of shared words-
also known by
Belief.

Nobody reads anymore
between the lines,
along the marginalia,
the mean matches the median,
rounded to zero.

At least there seems to be
never enough
Time
to explore other dimensions
completely
and related matters
in(di)visible as a (w)hole.





Artwork by Charles Demuth [No restrictions or Public domain], 'Roofs and steeple' c. 1921 via Wikimedia Commons.

It's Who and What you Know (about them)

We know more about people we've never known than ever before.

Before now, you did not know who you did not know,

and who you knew mattered mainly to you 

and only those who knew you

mattered more.

More than ever 

whatever you think is known. 

They know you 

and know what you think, or think they do.

They do know more than ever, 

not about what they know, but about what others think they know.

They think they know something about whatever, 

and whatever they think they know 

is something to think about. 

The ones that now think they know you, you need not think you know, 

even though they think you know you know them.

Think about how we know more now than ever before

about people

and maybe people are still learning.

Maybe learning 

whatever others think isn't knowing anything.

Knowing anything is better than not knowing what you know.

Is that what people think? I don't know.

You know, without knowing anything about you, 

I bet you know more about me than me...

who knows nothing and nobody 

ever more than ever before.

Painting by Abraham Solomon (1854), [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.