Another April Poem

Appearance and Reality

Every language has its mysteries and secrets,

Hidden cellars beneath the bottom floors

Where it keeps its archives of dreams and ideals,

Labyrinths of darkness and violence,

Beyond reason and common sense,

Deep root cellars underneath etymology,

Archaic caverns where unknown hands scratched their marks,

Moulded shapes out of the tactile stones,

Wore down eons of meaningless,

And only glimpsed at long distances inside sacred scripts:

Neither hieroglyph nor ritual cipher

Nor ideogram, analphabetic forms

Honed to the rhythms of the blood

And pulsations of the underground sea,

Violent, abusive murmurs, hatred and list

Seething in unfathomable darkness and silence.

*****

Strange inscriptions hollowed out of the primeval earth,

With neither sounds or sense, but something else;

Like worms impressing their lives in the soil

Or creatures of phosphorescence in a vent beneath the sea

Whose molecular structures experience sensations

No human has ever known, or sharks or insects that see

Spectacular sights beyond imagination.

Feathers, scales, outlandish and impossible designs,

Grotesque contortions of a mind before the mind,

Black holes that spew forth cosmic thoughts, colours

Invisible, exceeding infra and ultra length,

Dynamic exercises and vessels broken and scattered

Everywhere and nowhere, creating where and when,

As time goes by, without remembering or forgetting,

Living in a present that has neither past nor future,

And always being played again and again

without ever being the same or different.