The insight in Buddhism that calm and peace
and the alleviation of suffering are the end of
the rainbow of mindfulness never penetrated
my up and down mind. The end of rainbows
and everything else did get through. A long
book? Ends. Any given life? Finishes. The
stretch of a petal of a flower? Falls. Failings
pass the reality test every time they can be
measured and found wanting more, getting
less than that. I love a pure block of text, a
hexagonal rectangle, a paradox of initiation
and resolution. I'll keep listening and hear my
self think. I like to separate the possession from
the self. Each fiction, one legal and the other
epistemological, has itself to name. The stories
we tell ourselves must reckon with the nature
of desire: to be burned up by its own fire. No
tautologies here, this is all prewritten pre
scriptions, scribbled out so fast, so messy,
that the bearer can never be full. The golden
light of the dawn makes Crete feel like it was
a Moroccan yesterday, an adjective storm of
deserts and seize. Memorial pastness grasps
and often grabs what it speaks. That's why
love sticks to the jaws of every carnivore.
The meat gets its eat the way that the body
gets shoddy and breaks down into the dirt.
One just speeds up the other, in a manner of
wreaking. Give another hoot, howlers. This is
a place of screams left unheard, shouts bereft
and blurred, reactions fed into the reaction
machine and coming out with the shape of
a structure of peace and war and quiet, persistent
violence. All ends. All means end. A mere chapter
must book. A mere book must library. A mere
library must flame. Every flame looks fast in
the mirror and only feels its light. The smoke
and the heat are lost the way that light gets lost,
given a wide enough universe and several flicks
of time's indifferent wrist.
Roman Ryan 