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This is not a chemical poem.
Some chemicals are for pupils, burst open to steal the light from the hallway, spill it on the stairs, where chemicals for dreaming circulated neurons to your eyelids tiny chaotic bursts of some internal light projecting movies, chemical movies. Some chemicals are for sitting, still by the side for a moment catching breath, some chemicals make the awe so the breath needs catching and some chemicals made you worthy of the loss. Some chemicals are a trigger, and the violence is all around, a million perfect guns aimed a million birds and the grass beneath them sends a bullet, the chemicals will stop me in my tracks as I collapse. Some chemicals make life so green the grass it blinds, blinds, blinds, some chemicals are for dilating pupils, burst open to steal the light. This is not a chemical poem. Some chemicals come in bottles, but I won't file a complaint. These are blue like robins eggs, small like seeds for the roots they grow, synapses to synpases. Some chemicals are in one half of me, and some chemicals are in the other, and this chemical makes the bridge that makes this chemical another. This chemical makes the day like glass, a firm ground on the other side, where once I used to slip beneath now just passes by. Some chemicals make me forget. Some chemicals make me dizzy. Some chemicals make my emotions a lot more comprehensible, and some chemicals make them immune from comprehension, but these chemicals make them observable, like constellations: This thought is a sad one. This thought is a happy one. But this is not a chemical poem. I saw someone described as having soul, and I wondered what that meant. I used to know and it's not that I don't It isn't the bottle, the chemicals didn't drown it, but it transcends the chemical, it is acquired from outside, and the constant training of the spirit to ask, "and is this God? and is this?" The chemicals say yes, and I agree, in spite of it, but then they silence the question and the soul stops building on its foundation of wonder, the chemical for awe gone missing. It is joy through regulation, the despair neutralized the bliss stretched out to make a day, and there are no short bursts of ecstacy, as the chemicals on one side have their parade to the other, it is a solid crowd with no traffic and no downtime and no transcendence of the downtime with the flood of traffic: a street cannot welcome a crowd if it did not know loneliness, and that chemical has disappeared. And so God does not come to me as it once did Instead, it is time the struggle to find God, now- where once it lived in the imbalance of side a and side b, now, I have got to go looking out there, where you are, and you, and you, and you, and all the chemicals that make us and the rest of it. -e. |
