The Individualist and the Wilderness

As an individualist I have a very strong affinity with the wilderness. I would wager that many other individualists have a similar relationship. Nature is where the individualist can assert his or herself without restriction; the individualist and the wilderness have an almost inextricable bond. And it is a strange thing: that my need for deep and encompassing connections with other individuals is somehow negated when in the wild, that removing myself from human contact leads to a (temporary) dissipation for attachment. Perhaps for the individualist the need for this connection is unnecessary when placed in the most primal of environments. Or perhaps it is really its grandest fulfilment, that what I connect with in the wilderness has definitions that go beyond the prescriptions of human attachment.

Words for a Song II

There was a sudden silence and then an unlocking, a detaching of an entity from its corporeal foundations. Drifting away as the phases of time intermeshed. And all around there was a chill, one not discomforting but rather a receding growth—paradoxically warming.

M.M. — 25-Feb-2014

Esoteric effusion

What intrigues me most: skirting on the boundaries of reason; colours of imperceptible light; the rhythms and oscillations of the universe's language; mind-voyages across seas of space-time; the conception, gestation and parturition of the I; leaping from stagnation and insipidity to erupting, star-streaking self-awakening; dwelling in the darkened deeps talking to thought and thoughts; solar soul, son of the sun; the beginnings and the ends and how it all rotates round the axis of zero-infinity; the knowing and the feeling; the cataracts of self-accepting love.

Voyager

I wander 'mongst stars
Coursing round the Sun
Kinetic as a comet
Voyaging near and far

Time comes in revolutions
But I've been here
Since the beginning
Witness to cosmic dissolution

Travelling beams of light
From pulsar poles
To unknowns in black holes
Omniscient in mind and sight

Ex Tempore LXXV
M.M. — 08-Feb-2014

Breath of the Earth

The storms resurged,
recalling the time of first chaos.
The breath of the earth
heaved and heaved
as all the elements
wakened and stirred
as in the beginning.
Seas raged and tore themselves,
their abysses tumultuous
and untempered in darkness.
Lands of infant man quaked
as buttresses of his dominion
teetered on the brink
of rubble and dust.
Dust like the ash
left by hell-fires that raged
without abatement,
consuming aught and all
as propellant-sodden tinder.
Motion and upheaval
of this cataclysm
brought forth
the end and the beginning
of worlds of the past
and of the future.

Poem XL
M.M. — 06-Feb-2014

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.