On the morning of May 26, 2017 I woke up at uncharacteristically at 5am with a phrase that popped into my head which I thought worthy of writing down. Not having a pen nearby and being too tired to get up, I typed it into my iPhone. Then tried to go back to sleep. Another phrase – or what I would call a universal truth, an aphorism – popped in. Again, I typed it into the phone and tried to go back to sleep. But they kept coming. One after the other. It was like I was accessing aphoristic poetry in the liminal state between sleeping and waking. So I gave up trying to go back to sleep and just typed them all into the phone. Every time I would drift off into a semi-sleep state, more would come. It would have been easier to get up and find a pen, but I didn’t want to break the spell by lifting out of bed. Below is the fruit of this experience, a fragmented, aphoristic poem (later re-arranged and cleaned up). I’m now going to keep pens by the bed.
It’s better to wake up in tears
Than to not wake up at all
Buff out all your blind spots
Press your head against the windshield of stars
Know all the languages at once
Fall in love with everything
But ask for nothing
Every memory you’ve ever had
Is reflected upside down
In a single tear of god
Hold the book up high
But not so that it’s shape obscures the light needed to read it
A vast cosmos encapsulated inside the tiniest seed of truth
Don’t inhabit this truth
BE this truth
Conjure a small truth from the ashes of lies
We do not pardon the child for being a child
Or berate a number for its sum
Nothing is wrong in the universe, all is allowed because all is
A backward mouth eating from the inside to reveal the outside
To best conceal something, hide it in the revealed
In darkness, we are born upside down breathing water
Each minute of your life
Is simply the time is takes for a moon to eclipse a sun
A photon of light experiences no time
Time experiences all light
Come out of the darkness
To taste a cherry, so fragrant and so sweet
And emerge not burnt but illuminated
Travel through hills of sugar
Only to return home home having lost your sweet tooth
To smell all the shades of green
And lick cinnamon from a tree
All the colors of beauty, whispered to the lord
The universe has a way of taking care of things. Abide by this mechanism.
By saying what it is
Is to say what it isn’t
A furlough from Eden
