Simulacrum

We makers wonder how this world was made,

before our busy hands and cunning brains

tore up the rocky soil, and so despoiled

that finely woven tapestry laid down

before we came upon the sylvan scene,

and formed the notion we could do better,

draining swamps of bestial desires,

crossings oceans and setting forest fires.

Beneath the cast off dolls and building blocks,

at the bottom of our nursery box,

lies a mysterious game, long forgotten,

played with tokens and broken instruments,

a pastime too enigmatic to explain

but one fraught with forbidden joys and pain

banished to forgetfulness into the

lost lands of our gelatinous domain.

Grown now from childish things we wonder where

we were before our fleshy clock began

to tick and tock our imaginary

lives away, or who our real Mother was

before that first comforting softness we seek

was born out of some viscous discontent,

under a tumultuous sea or sky,

to form a nurturing breast or downy cheek.

In the vessel, ready made, the child lies

undead, not hoping to be born to light,

unafraid, waiting in the limpid dark,

floating in the airless void, not breathing,

armed with the possibility of life,

a being not knowing if it will be,

not yet hearing the voices that proclaim,

'you are human and must bear your pain'.

Those silent voices that lie within, where

none can hear, insisting that the bather

must now descend into the clammy tube

below, expelled from the fruitful garden,

so carelessly planted by the Father,

onto the earthen floor or sheeted bed,

without a bye-your-leave to indicate

if there were a choice to be born or dead.

A ghostly being, seeming whole, conjured

From the shuffling toil, rhythmic spirals twist

and spin, grasping the noumena within

to release that first gasping, choking breath:

achieving life it must prepare for death,

or so the judgment goes by those who have

seen how things are with that mutual bond

between knowing flesh and its phantom friend.

With all the crying and the bloody waste

the time for metaphysical distaste

must be delayed, until our newborn ghost

can master the intricacies of life,

and consider at last the peculiar

genesis of its being from pleasure

that, as physicists, we cannot find,

at least not without admitting mind.

But when the word is finally spoken,

It will be a simulacrum of its source;

rivers without rain and rain without clouds,

words before words could be, sounds before sounds,

void before extension, an infinite

sentence without punctuation to parse

eternal laughter from the endless pain

of the never being from whence it came.