Limits

Everything we know and everything we believe is limited to a given extent. This is at once a bad and good thing. It is a bad thing because we may rely on assumptions when said assumptions are not appropriate for a given situation. I may make the mistake of believing that something or someone is the case when in fact my beliefs are too limited to make an informed and proper decision about such—which could result in a range of detrimental consequences. And it is a good thing because our limits are what permit growth and development; they are what engenders learning, and importantly, re-learning. As a scientist, this excites me because it means that what I may know and discover today could very likely be supplanted tomorrow; something new is always waiting to be known—my current knowledge is only as firm and as confident as the knowledge I will acquire tomorrow. And tomorrow will always await.

Certainty

Find yourself in the throes of despair and it will become painfully clear that an intractable symptom is the difficulty in trusting certainties, at least positive ones. But time and time again I rely on one particular certainty: that tomorrow always holds another day. The new day brings a new sun and with it the chance to try again, to win, to fight the darkness. This is the certainty that you can hold on to, the one that you can trust. And I wholly believe in this; I place my faith in every new day and in every new sun. Today the world may not be mine, but tomorrow...tomorrow the world waits to be won.

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