A speck of agitation is Self –
Moulded by atoms and deformed
By abstract hope –
Stillness?
Can it be gathered
Does its harvest yield, nourish
The discontent of argument?
Thoughts nearly always
Remain young even as the
Withered lips smile
The thoughtful idea is beauty – not age.
Being part of the spinning top
Myself and other selves
Are giddy with a sickness cast from space
That speeds hours born of clocks
As life is born when Time beckons –
Not the philosophers’s time, that may or may not exist
Or the poet’s time that dances and reclines
In tune to line or rhyme
Or the prisoner’s time that marks off years
Slowly like a draught of poison from
A dank green bottle that doesn’t kill,
When drunk destroys the soul
Just as the time of the damned is endless
Or the time of the blessed is restless even in paradise –
This space-time
This spinning top Time
Beckons and then quickens
And then grows like children
Too fast for the strength
Ever to regain its first health –
No Galileo is needed
To declare this star valid
The spinning top is its own
Windmill –
Just as myself makes claim
Only to pains felt –
Giving a sympathy for yours,
This star is master and mistress
Of the universe because nothing else
Has yet bettered it –
A mere spin-off from a too hot sun
A spinning globe of mystery
Probably doomed sooner or later –
The atoms seek revenge,
Either with great bangs and mushrooms
Made of fire or by a coldness called
The end –
Victory, brilliant and displayed like
The triumph of a battle shines
From the stars –
Follow us spinning top –
We have raged the black nothingness
Of light years dark without peace
To shine and sparkle and tempt
To glitter –
Yet we are dull – even dead –
Leaden dreams to your beautiful face –
All human matter contains in fragment
A piece of star-life – all selves
Joined together forever by objects
Still in their essence clinging to space –
Monopolised by a hazardous beginning
Making each self an island difficult
To reach, formed from a distant star
Whose energy is finished but whose
Venture within us continues to breathe –
Rimbaud’s ‘black and white moons’
Float and drift like balloons –
Until pricked by rays that scatter their
Pieces hither and thither through space-time
Where they shine everlasting pictures –
The spinning top holds star-history
Within rocks, within patterns of tree-wood
Within humanity’s dreams of heaven –
Moving outwards, onward with
Terrible storms –
Yet always still within itself –
The known spinning top
Gathers speed – going where?
Whilst seas reflect space moods
As skies strike thunder at blue waves
And space-caves become filled with
A strange yet silent promise –
Were there perhaps foul stars
With gases evil, a core of badness
Swirling amid storms so terrible
That no imagination can touch their might
Only a grim mythology of giants, star-gods
And blood rimmed eyes can paint the
Sunrise of a diseased beginning –
And gentle perfect stars – perhaps
Falling, ever falling from a healthy sun
Which shines silver behind the moon’s back
And laughing like pretty children laugh
At play as the spinning top experienced day
Then night – onward in space –
Yet seeming still –
The moving clouds, the rain showers –
And somewhere the desert sand –
So quick to tempest – so hard to understand –
Ever forward accurately passing
The shadowy black-holes which suck
All heaven’s waste in
One absurd mouthful –
Into everlasting darkness –
Applied logic or controlled madness –
Even perhaps a feeble joke –
The spinning top gives its clues with care
The initiate’s books tell of their theories –
Of dark beginnings, of matter going this way
Or that, of great lumps falling, joining,
Breaking up – of it all being strung together
Like balls of string.
Or chaos.
Forever.
Freezing, dark –
Shänne Sands.
From the selection Fragments of Desire.
FootSteps Press.
#shannesands
#fragmentsofdesire