(Close your eyes, and continue)

Flowing music echoing from the steel rafters of heaven, the nuts and bolts of the very framework of the world and all its atrocities. It gathers to a greatness the warmth of the motional bus, rolling around for reasons it doesn’t even attempt to explain, to a destination that is undecided until it is reached. Laugh all you demons and angels, lift your voices in longing for the place of the mortal hand, and may you weep for us, we, who cannot weep for ourselves. We who, seeing the overpowering beauty of this world, merely sink further and further into the muck of our inner cruelties, and cannot recognize this power by the signs it leaves in its wake. What almighty boat generates these waves as it passes through the ultimate medium? One cannot help but guess, and arrive at undocumented conclusions that should remain as such. The answers to these questions cannot be communicated, the leaves of a fig tree, the beams within a sturdy tower, the lights enclosed in a sleepy overhang, the physical realizations of everything we have tried so hard to reproduce from the blueprints of our heads. We make do with what we can to compile these things into their final forms, and each thing, each light or object, has about it a sphere of influence that permeates and meshes with the surrounding spheres, molding and melding and molding that which is melded again and again, folds upon folds, and where those spheres touch each other, where they meet and where they mingle, there is a question. Each question is just another fold in time and space, just another layer underneath that which we are able to perceive.

Twanging fibers of chordal recognition.

(Open your eyes)

I look up to see the interlocking fibers, the lives of hookers, priests and divers, the souls of people who passed on through, striving to find and to make and to do. Reality is one piece, one endless strand, wrapped in more knots than we can understand, a ribbon of nothing, tied into a bow creating from nothing boats to row, suns to shine, and winds to blow. Clouds to rain and seeds to grow. Fleshy green grass blades thrust up their timid heads while children dream and fools make love all on soft clean beds. Bushes grow from bright green field mud and trees sprout from the gathering sludges. Poison is brewed from exotic plant bud. Men invent enemies and hold their grudges. Sailing, swimming, climbing through the sea on an endless conveyor belt of crystalline fluid. The gods of the ocean and the foundling forest: the probability that each branch of each tree will grow out in any one direction. The beauty of the universe seeps through our souls and exits again, unscathed and unfelt, and finds its way to the innermost reaches of dark labyrinthine hallways and sewers desperate for a friend; colors and their many names striped along the sides of long sheets proclaiming the worthiness of nations. A cold white rock. Hiking boots worn to pieces with love, lungs filled with black cancerous smoke, hands worn down to the bone, eyes dried to their roots, ever searching, never finding.

Morning breaks, and the cool night pieces together again.