In fish-stink markets
drunk again
unready for attack
I vomit down the wishing well;
dull animal stares back.

These forms arising from within:
illusion without end.
These animals were always mine
to butcher, or befriend.

I do not mind:
This hole, this heart,
the knots were loosely tied.
The desert’s lip is at my boot,
machete by my side.

Stray but from
the path, dear boy,
and all will fall,
will fall, will fall.

Limbs of a thousand
trees groan down,
thunder on your shoulders.
Feet sunk deep in sucking mud.

You pawn,
you errand-boy. You serve a lazy master
whose will is an anvil on your spine,
whose face is made of paper.

then at once the pond explodes,
in fountains spiral up,
an agony of peptides.
geyser spinning, spinning,
folding in upon itself.
and the sound washes over me.

fifty thousand cycles:
sunning Hell days dusty rocks,
albumen sucked from shattered eggs,
flapping panicked wings…
a smear of blood on the savannah.

biology, the manic squawking
over wave-assaulted rocks
compounded, trilobyte, exertion,
rainfall stirs the smell of ferns.
and organism slithers onto throne.

from shore I see it rolling on
towards completion of a sort,
which I will never know —
except as cells
know the mysteries of music,
the sadness beneath the laughter.

then, deep in your velvet box
you showed me the seeds
of what i would become.
and i cursed you for it.
i did not want to be chosen like that.

now the threads are weaving together
and i fear,
will it be a burial shroud
or a wedding dress?

there is work to be done, my lover
and many bodies need tending.
so i will follow you
as long as this dream
still trembles on your horizon.

i rise up
i rise up
wind around my shoulders
foam about my knees
i rise up
in the transformation
seeds of learning
storms of doubt

your pillar
rising from the ocean
my new body
spat glistening
from the jungle
onto your slopes

Adam’s dust in on your temples
David’s thirst is in your loins
you have crossed the sands to see Me
don’t forsake me for some coins!

for the charm of life is fleeting
often squandered, often bruised
and the one sin I can speak of
is the sin of life unused

The road stretches open
across gray, gray soil
and the weight of heaven
is a chorus
chanting gentle and relentless
in my ear
To be free
of what causes fear:
things forgotten
and rued, in darkness
nausea and itching regret.
Let me be.

How many ways this march can end
trooping dissonant into the buzz
of a lost mathematic
or wrinkling gentle curves
into thistles
in the corners

The sky shakes like a frightened lamb
While the letters unbroken slide
The whole sky is shaking
and I am so small
A drop in your ocean of sand

There is talk in the village
And rumor in the field
A stranger! A stranger has come
speaking the words of Man
with the voice of lightning
in heavy clouds

Why does the earth tremble like a leaf today?
And how the wilderness heaves!
Is it your wind that blows at last
through the dust and leaves
me scrawling my mark upon the sands?

Oh, one last drop of milk, of sweet water
before we fly
To remember the gentle touch
of rain on hands
and of this tiny love,
before we increase forever
inspired

All we have are metaphors. Consider, then, the image of a wall. We are walking along a wall. We’ve been walking along this wall for a long, long time, so that the road ahead has always seemed more or less the same. Sure, the texture of the wall changes, there are objects on the ground to discover, but the wall itself is a given. People who talk about an end to the wall are considered deluded, their views relegated to religion and crack science. What evidence is there that the wall will not always be there? It’s absurd to think of. Still others claim to have found cracks in the wall, or windows, through which they’ve seen incredible things. The wall is not just a wall, they say, it’s part of a larger structure — there is something going on here. They too are laughed at; most people peering through the cracks see only darkness. But the concept of an end to the wall persists.

Eventually, people begin to sense that there is something strange about the road ahead. The wall looks different, somehow, up in the distance. Speculation soars. If there is an end to the wall, then our ceaseless walking will inevitably bring us to it. Most people have always assumed that the end of the wall will be the end of everything; the wall is the only constant in their world — it IS their world. If it ends, what else is there? They can’t conceive of any movement except along the wall. But as the anomaly grows nearer, some people begin to think: what if the end of the wall is really a corner? What if the the mystics and the seers were right, and the wall was just the edge of a much larger space? A corner implies a new dimension, a radical new direction to in which to travel. A corner IS an end, in one sense, but only of the old direction of travel. After it is turned, the journey continues — into fundamentally new territory.

What some people are proposing is that time is like this wall. It is not just a line, but a structure. Time has a texture to it, and it is usually fairly small, not enough to distract us from the continuous forward flow. But the slightest amount of texture implies that there is a dimension of change which runs perpendicular to what we call time. This, in turn, implies the possibility of a corner. Mystical and psychedelic visions are glimpses of the larger structure, explorations of the SPACE in which what we call time is just a LINE. Hyperspace, Eternity: we live on a line, and can’t think of anything not on that line, even as it twists and shimmies through dimensions inconceivable to the human imagination.

Biocultural evolution seems more and more like an attempt to leave this line, to break free from the constraints of space and time. Developments in transportation and communication increasingly transcend issues of distance and delay. Recording technologies change the idea of time, of past and present. The planet is linking up: cyberspace is being terraformed. With enough connections in place, a new structure begins to emerge, as if we were playing some global game of connect-the-dots. The monkey wants to leave its tree.

This is not, however, a celebration of technology as something unquestionably good. We may destroy ourselves while still in the transition phase. Some of the most cherished aspects of the human may disappear into the transhuman condition. No one really knows what to expect; no one has the master plan, and new tools are not always used by skilled and responsible hands. We have unleashed processes that we do not know how to control, which will kill us if we can’t surf their waves. There is also the issue of preparedness. We must make our minds flexible. Without understanding, our minds may die of shock when we turn a corner we thought could never exist.