Hello Hivelanders. I hope November is treating you well. It is cold, cold where I am. I imagine astronauts are a layer short from what I must don to keep from becoming a poetical popsicle. Actually, in the absence of wind chill and with layers of woolen, the streets are quite pretty. I don't remember snow sparkling like it does up here. Diamonds everywhere. I was thinking as I walked back from a family dinner over at my sisters that if I were impervious to cold, I couldn't imagine a more beautiful environment. But I am not immune to frost and was happy to get inside again, have a hot bath, light a few candles, and then settle in to write this blog.

I am going to begin our poetic adventure with an older poem. I frequent a social media sight that caters exclusively to writers. An online friend on there remarked that my verse was lyrical but the meter unconventional. So just to prove that I can indeed count syllables and ascertain assonance, I augered back into the annals of my work and found what might be the first scientifically-type poem I ever wrote.

Gravity is a bit of downer but without it we would be lost in space.

Gravity Takes a Stand

I could fly; I could fly, you proudly proclaim

Flap all you like furless, featherless ape
Only your head will ever inflate

Birds know to fly only so high
You’d reach beyond the sky
And into space—internal combust
Your guts all over the place

It’s true; I tie limbs to the Earth
Mire in mud; cover in filth
I hold you down with an invisible glove
But care I do; granted, it’s a tough love

Despite ravings to the contrary, it looks like gravity and the principles of density will keep doing what they always do, and the heavens will stay aloft after all. That is the thing about cosmically gluey stuff, they keep the matrix scaffolded and spinning, even when we get a little wild and emotional. I am pretty certain things would indeed get swampy if all of sudden orbits and axis came to a stand still, went on strike, and ceased to plow the Way, Perhaps the floor of existence would give up under the weight of everything no longer suspended and twirling en pointe; or the fabric of spacetime would smoothen, and all those poor protons, forced to continually take the long way around, could finally take the short cut, fly as the crow, and over take time. Take a spin by Einstein, circa his date with Marilyn, just to blow an I-told-you-so florescent raspberry into his smiling face.

No doubt gravity would just simply grab back hold of the covers, and send us spinning once again, but this time in the opposite direction and inside out. Where we end up orbiting and with whom, who knows, but things will eventually get hot and heavy again. No matter our cravings for freedom and individuality, when gravity has its way, we eventually come togeher.

Astronomical Heavy and Heavenly

collision, fusion
opposites attract
but in the absence of options
a positive spin is better
than nothing

will eventually
lead to everything

sprawling
gravitational
eternal balance
radiative

the most primal of unions
a helical waltz through
the plasmic folds of spacetime

atomic love nest
a periodic nursery
a smelter's furnace

depending on how big you are
how fast you fall and in what direction

true love
according to the bard
is written in the stars
conceived unconditionally
among the astronomical
heavy and heavenly
undefined and enlightened

It seems to me that existence is based on fractals, patterns that repeat themselves from the sub-atomic, to the cellular, to the ecological, and all the way to the cosmological. Or it could be that I am forever in search of a map and a how-to guide, as I feel my way with only a handful of senses through this life; maybe I confuse coincidence with forethought.

Or it could be that creation only has a few moves, but infinite limbs and space, Physical forces have simply spirographed a galaxy, or a billion, thrown in some DNA and voila, here we are, squiggly and dizzy, crashing into each other, argumentative as all, as we all slowly, slowly go down the drain of spacetime. It is all a blur, for all of us, and that puts things into perspective when you think about it.

73

The Tao spins a web
Both expanding and infinitely finer in detail

Fractals among growing scaffold

No spider with the grandest of schemes
Could ever match the workmanship
Could ever match the artistry
Could ever match the foresight

In trying one becomes tangled
In her own hubris
In her own machinations

Just as one becomes tangled
In the spider’s web
The more she struggles
The more she is stuck

Do not struggle against the Tao
There is no escaping her web

From each spinning
From each cocoon
You will not be consumed
But like the butterfly, lifted

Link to spoken word

I suppose there really is no struggling against everything, well there is struggling, but there is no wining and no end to the tangles and snags we cause, usually with the best intentions. Being human we do like to weave our narratives and then play tug o war over who owns them, whose derivative is the real, unembellished tale.

Here is the thing, we all took part in twisting and looping the yarns and to our individual perspectives, the knit will look a little different, too tight, too loose, just right, as long as we are in agreement. We tend to see what we look for and everyone sees things a little bit different. So take some time everyday, meditate or pray, and free yourself from narratives, especially your own.

If you get really good at it, you may even be able to convince yourself gravity has let go of you too. Stay grounded and loose, Hivelanders. I'd miss you if your were flung to the other side of the universe, lost in a gravitational temper tantrum.

Words and Images are my own.

Gravity Takes the Stand is published in Monsters, Avatars, and Angels. Astronomical Heavy and Heavenly is published in Domesticate the Heavens. 73 is published in 81, Poems from the Tao. All titles are available in paperback or digital through amazon and your local libraries and bookstores. Click on any title below to further explore and support my writing.