Gaps: A Poem
While the tides rise,
while skullface late night talk show hosts try to make neoliberalism funny,
while the war drums of the Bastards vibrate the air,
remember:
You are supported by the emptiness between the atoms,
by the emptiness between the stars,
by the emptiness between your thoughts,
by the emptiness which surrounds your perception.
The end has always been as nigh as nigh gets.
Death was lounging between your electrons from the moment you were conceived.
We who look with both eyes see the gargoyles,
but we also see the emptiness.
We recline against that space between,
cradled in the heart of the timeless.
~
So when the TV is lying and your friends are all blind,
when they call your light madness and strike your diamond from your hands,
when Grandmother Tree confesses that she is worried about the water,
take heart.
Birds of all colors roar out of the darkness in each moment,
join together to form all this, then fly off.
The needle-toothed Bastards cannot touch your magic,
cannot know the emptiness,
cannot see the birds.
A few howling primates gibbering about finance
on a spinning rock that is hurtling through blackness
in a universe that they do not understand.
They do not run this show.
They do not lead this dance.
~
There is a castle at the center of two forest lungs
with a dead angel on a swing made of ivy.
Eel ogres hurl cars in the gaps of your neurons
and between your electrons,
owls soar.
~
What I’m trying to say,
in my bumbling way,
is that there are so many hiding spaces.
There are miracles lurking in the gaps of all things,
and so little of life is yet known.
~
I ran into your mother on the underside of a dream,
beneath the hull where the oil bats sleep.
She gave me a sandwich and a necklace of teeth —
oh yeah, and this letter for you in a jug:
Don’t be a smartass, don’t pick your nose,
and never, ever give up.
This thing will not move how you think it will move;
there’s so much more going on than you know.
Say please and thank you and don’t bite your friends,
and remember we all love you to death.
You have conjurations of galaxies deep in your guts,
and my child you are covered in feathers.
So listen — Listen! — to those spaces between;
sit and watch until angels march through.
The thing that will save us (don’t scratch your butt in public)
will come from the gaps, where the old withered patterns don’t tread.
It will be unexpected, when you’re about to give up,
so sit up straight and just do as I say.
Be ready to act, be alert, be polite,
and when the time comes,
let it through.
