Through a crack in the lid my eye descries
a million gleaming skulls – between
there & now I recognise;
a cracked cranium, a gold filling,
a glass eye, a captain’s cap
- all in various stages of decay.
Now standing on the lip of the mouth
I ask myself Am I a memory
an ancient form, a word, a clown,
a fool, a reptile, or an embryo . . .?
I begin to walk away, to wander more
to search for signs, a light in dark
blood on the stones, evidence
of my life in all life . . . somebody
Am I an infant, a bird, an energy,
an aardvark, a cracking bone, a stretch of skin . . .
I reach the point, the line, where worlds
become one – where one ceases to exist
as they have before, but yet as they always have . . .
Am I a moment in time & place, a feeling
of pain or joy, a breath, a reflection,
a youth, an aged dying being, someone
aware of their limits & capacities . . .
I go beyond that place to the land of ghosts
& Prophets; to nature’s time, to the unknown
but the imagined, to the stars & the core
of the earth, to my heart & to a line that is
not to be traversed, but traced . . .
Am I a dream, an old being, a state of mind,
a veil of blood floating on a mirrored lake . . .
When I get there I have many questions,
that will remain unanswered forever.
Yet glimpses will avail themselves, only
to be discovered on another plane,
another sphere of experience, far from finite . . .
Am I a sick thing, a dead one, a chain-link,
a tree, a grain of sand, a construction of chaos,
a dissolution of matter . . . I am here now,
I have gone & returned. I have ceased
to breathe, in order to live . . .
& now I breathe & dream again . . .