Thursday, September 30, 2010

Nothing Something Everything: Overture

Note: The following tripartite prose poem takes place on three parallel tracks (Nothing, Something and Everything) which one may read in several sequences:
A. From start to finish, including each track (as in a traditional poem)
B. One track at a time (i.e. only italics, standard or bold)
C. Two tracks at a time (e.g. standard and bold but not italics)
D. Repeating some lines, skipping others, reading backwards, etc. (for complete reader control)

Overture
This is about one thing, one thing that we don’t have a word for
You need three angles to describe this one thing
The answer is somewhere in between
Nothing & something & everything
Something & nothing & everything
Everything & nothing & something
Separate & at once
Each existing at once
Everywhere & at once
Pressing against each other
Codependent, defined in opposition
If not for the others, all would fall
Three tangled strands in one ball of yarn
Three streams in one river, not together and not apart
There are two sides to the same coin & also a bit in the middle
We move circularly, simultaneously, paradoxically
Three. The balancing act. The most stable of structures.
Nothing Something Everything. The history of the universe.
Everything Something Nothing. The history of me. Why go on?
Something is in here, after everything & nothing
Read between the lines
It’s hard on the eyes and the mind
Just bear with me
Pause to mull
It’s unreadable. It’s unlivable. And yet I lived it.
You’ll just have to trust me
Go digging
Don’t start here because it looks like the beginning
Glance anywhere & get something
Anyplace is as good as any
When you meet someone, you can’t go back to when they were born
Like you could pick out any memory & learn who I am
So dance to the beat of your own conundrum
You move sideways & backwards in history though forced forward temporally
Feeling around in the past for clues to the present
The mind fills in the gaps
We don’t know what we’re doing
A jigsaw has no objective beginning
We are a process, a never-ending middle
A person is a jigsaw never finished
& one day we’ll realize we’re all part of the same puzzle
We replace pieces & scribble over pieces & lose the pieces we’re looking for
Walking the length of the razor-sharp edge between perfection and oblivion
Playing with pieces selected by life and finished by death
& we dance on the blade of a jigsaw

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