The Chemical Spirit

So this is what we have come to:
self-sustaining electro-biochemical systems in motion
coming or colliding together
and fracturing apart just as easily.

The infinity of thought
combusts a thousand-million times
in a thousand-million cells,
in undulations as the song
and voice of the universe.

And if our spirits be not material
but chemical,
we are connected still to each other
through the miracle of our creation
begun aeons ago in the dust
of the first star-light.

Poem XXXIX
M.M. — 30-Jan-2014

Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer

Stand atop the heights of the world

And you stand alone

Here upon this place it is you and your fears

The mists below: the mysteries of the world

You have clambered and crawled and climbed

To reach this point
Through the mists and through the fears
And the exhilaration is dizzying

"I ran away from institutions

I owe myself life"*

You are the wanderer

And the sea of fog the shroud that lays over your life
You stand atop the heights of the world
And you stand alone

Ex Tempore LXXIV
M.M. — 26-Jan-2014

*Gojira, "L'enfant Sauvage"

"I sped back and forth"

I sped back and forth
through time
searching eternity
for her.
Nothing but dust and
the cycling of heat
to measure the journey.
We lost one another
in the future,
in the past,
sometime when time
was particles or
absolute, motion-less cold.
Was she in between events,
in the lifetime of a moment?
Or stuck in the
void
of befores-and-afters?

Ex Tempore LXXIII
M.M. — 16-Jan-2014

You Can't Take the Sky from Me*

You can take my wealth
take my health
lead me to brink of death

Steal from me my sight
decimate my might
hurl my love into blackest night

Take these,
but you can't take the sky from me

Ex Tempore LXXII
M.M. — 12-Jan-2014

*Title from Capt. Malcom Reynolds (Serenity)

Art and Science

Art and Science: the distance between them is a false one. To feel and to know are the halves of the essence of human being.

The Life Story

Your life is the greatest story you could ever read. Why? Because it has all of it: There's adventure and humour, drama and suspense, love and tragedy, birth and death. What's more, the lessons that you can learn from it really do stick with you; there's just no skimming the book of life. And unlike any other book, you just can't flip to the end to see how it all turns out. What happens on the next page, the next chapter, is anyone's guess. And that's all at once pretty scary and exciting, I think!

"The dreams came back"

The dreams came back to haunt again,
and she was right at the fore of them.
A little older and wiser but still the same;
a thing entwined never really leaves.

Dancing with her in the summer rain;
it was a memory that never happened,
but one that held fast with iron chains.
Dancing under the sun one May day.

I consort with the night, slumberless,
and there in the dark her face shines.
She speaks words of starlight that bind,
to a dreamer wishing to be deaf and blind.

The dreamer must awaken or fall,
escape the dream-halls and end it all.
Or is there no end to the reverie?
No release for he who remains entralled?

Poem XXXIX
M.M. — 05-Jan-2014

Love and Freedom

I believe that love is, in a sense, a form of freedom, an exhilarating freedom. This freedom comes from the realisation that you are accepted for who and what you are, whatever those may be. It can be a frightening thing to be who you really are, and for somebody to embrace you as you are is a truly remarkable thing. To someone you are the most brilliant of stars, twinkling in a colour that can only be perceived by that person. And this is of course reciprocated by you to the one you love. Love, then, is like a release, from the shackles of self-doubt, self-deprecation and loneliness; a release into a freedom where you can flourish and develop unrestricted. To love and to be loved is to be free.