Passing Through the Event Horizon

It hits you hard and unexpected, 
And you feel the breath leave your body...
Thoughts explode like the beginning of time and space,
Leaving you gasping for air...
A shower of needles in your lungs
Before equilibrium can be regained...
That flash of bright white light
In your mind...
Concussive force...
Emotional confusion...
In those milliseconds before that familiar sensation of fear and confusion 
Begin to attempt normalization,
You may as well be nothing at all...
The ego takes a moment to bite into the gears...
That first contraction of a cell before it begins to cleave into two...
Four...
Eight...
And so on...
Those first moments are hot and dense...
Painless and performative...
The hurt takes a while to settle in...
That soft leathery exoskeleton takes its time
Hardening to electric carbon...
Everything is buzzing like powerlines on a hot day...
Like fluorescent lights humming...
Plasma burning...
Then comes the vertigo...
Adjusting to what it is to be here...
To be back here...
Not even aware enough as yet
To assess the event horizon destabilized...
These things just happen...
They happen all at once...
From out of nowhere,
And with no warning...
It is always surprising...
A shock to the system...
Even if you had the one unified formula that explains everything completely, 
It still knocks you off your feet,
It makes you forget who you were...
When you know it all,
You learn nothing...
When you know nothing,
Wonder and awe can fill your eyes...
The why of it all allowed to become a question,
Rather than a previously known totality...
The fractures of mind are what give you physicality...
 The confusion of new and growing sensations pushing and pulling make you feel alive...
None of it is any more than a holographic projection,
A fractal equation repeating through Fourier transform...
But it feels so real...
So alive...
The pain and the ecstasy, 
The love and the hate...
Every moment that the void maps onto the graph, every point,
Is something greedily devoured...
Voraciously experienced...
There is never enough...
And down and down and down you go...
Remembering bits here...
Forgetting bits there...
Pure information always stored away in the nothingness...
You will always love it...
You are a part of something impossible...
Something wonderful...
A perpetual dream...
On the granular level of an individual life,
It is as real as it needs to be...
Comfortably watching the movie
While wrapped in a blanket...
Fleshy and warm...
These are just punctuation marks
In the writhing shimmer...
Eternity has no mass...
It is less than the point of a needle...
Singularity...
And now you can imagine breath for a time...
Breathe...

Flytrap and Honeydew

 Spent a good twenty or so years
Trying to participate in the drudgery
Called marriage...
Don't get me wrong,
Some people do fall in love
With a partner who supports them,
Understands them,
And doesn't sabotage or emotionally abandon them...
It can happen...
But, for me,
It hasn't happened just yet,
Not when it comes to "holy" matrimony...
I've given up on that idea...
Not asking for pity...
There were some beautiful moments
Lodged like diamonds
In the substrate of organic refuse and silt
Deposited on the river bottom...
There were brief flashes of light,
Fireflies intermittently flickering in the darkness...
But that darkness
Was still oppressive, overall...
My chosen partners took their dissatisfaction with their own families and childhood out on me,
And injected their own trauma and pain
With surgical precision into my veins...
Maybe they didn't realize they were causing pain,
Maybe they sometimes did...
In either case,
The end result was dried mud veins branching out
To protect termites from the sun...
Holes propagating through the supporting structures all the way down to the pith...
Catastrophic system failure of the institution was the eventual outcome,
Every time...
Irrational dreams of forever...
Some socially indoctrinated drive
To feel incomplete without a partner...
The edges of organized religion...
The inability of apes
To grow past simple biological imperative
No matter how much our technology
Draws stars in our eyes...
We're passing time until we die...
Metaphorically scratching in the dirt
Not even knowing what we're looking for...
Driving blind...
Hoping for the best...
Energy trapped in physicality...
Frozen light
Compressed into dust motes
That make up every particle of our being
Whether that be physical material or disembodied quantum fields...
Flesh or soul...
In every possible outcome of every possible story...
True life and blindsided...
The shake and the shimmer, 
The glitz and the glam
Of experiencing life
Makes you forget what you really are,
What you used to be,
And where you really came from...
The jaws slowly closing like a hydraulic press,
Nowhere to go but out
Bursting perpendicular to the direction of applied force...

102° Fahrenheit

 

                                                                                       Light like tea colored twilight at 5 pm.
Northern hemisphere. 
30.4692° longitude.
Two days before the longest day.
Haze building to an eventual storm.
Full on storm clouds have not yet arrived...
But they're coming...
Maybe.
102° Fahrenheit. 
Wind and rain will cool things down for the night,
In preparation for another blinding 100+ degree day tomorrow.
The extremes will continue to create distance,
Flying in spiraling grace
From the center point.
Things that arose
As a response to external stimuli,
Emergent situations changing the landscape,
A response to an urgent need,
These cures to past problems flourish,
And multiply beyond their means,
Then, in turn, they create new problems...
New emergent events,
Ills that beg for a cure...
Dominoes perpetually falling...
History drunkenly repeating...
Sometimes the rain never comes.
Just distant flashes and low rumbling thunder making empty promises.
Deer on the edge of the forest listen to every word.

Limbo

 The times in-between times...
Liminal perceptions...
Consistent feeling of imminent change,
But the change has not yet materialized...
Thoughts frozen even as they travel through time...
Superficial emotional catatonia...
Isometric psychological contraction...
Supreme effort exerted
For so little visible change...
Time dilation due to mass,
Rather than velocity...
Perceived gravity...
Crushing force...
Unable to bear silence...
Always a broadcast playing...
Distracting sights and sounds...
An excuse to sit motionless for hours
Because the world is a complicating place...
A shark tank in feeding frenzy...
Blood in the water...
Dark rose blooms...
Questioning the accepted nature of reality...
Questioning its purpose...
Questioning if their is some ultimate goal...
Waiting in die cast anticipation
For the next external event to mark time...
Always passing...
Not always consistent...
A delicate web reacting to the current...
The ebb and the flow...
Fine lines etching the surface...
Stress fractures releasing what's inside...
A slow seepage of plasma...
Shining...
Drying...
Exposed...