the equator

We were learning about geography the other day, about physical boundaries versus political, when it struck me (for the first time) that the equator doesn't exactly exist. The equator is an imaginary line. Imagine! The borders of nations, like the borders of states and cities and etcetera, are imaginary as well. While we're at it, money is imaginary too, but through consensual hallucination, it is agreed upon to be real, though temporary. Like breath.

We take about six hundred million breaths in a lifetime. If eleven hundred people could breathe dollars for all of their seventy one years, we'd have a bailout package. It's like a t-shirt I saw on a corpse the other day: "Pain is weakness leaving the body." Do you feel stronger yet? Or are you pain-free, yet weak? I can imagine.

If you're anything like me, there was something in your childhood room that scared you. For me, it was a block, from the bin of blocks. This one wasn't a cube or conic or cuboid, but flat on two ends and oddly bent and unevenly curved in the middle. Once, in the throes of fever, I imagined that evil block filling my room up with gurgling otherness that flowed and pinned me tightly to the bed. Because I was a child, I never considered getting rid of it, though. Today, I see this block (as I write) and I see its long-dormant discomfort, the craft of its woodwork, and I see now it looks like a horse's front leg.

Physical boundaries are real, but vary with the changing landscape and are thus not entirely objective. Surprising! that the surface of the Earth, the solid ground you stand upon even now, is open to interpretation, while the imaginary lines of government are true, demonstrable, and held fast in the arms of the law. While we're at it, the law is real, temporary and consensual, but cops hate it if you call the law a hallucination. If you - Umm...I was just watching two women going through my recycling bin, picking out the aluminum cans. The fundamentals of the economy. Sorry, where was I?

If you're anything like me (though I do pray you are not), you are wishing fervently for things to stop happening. What is the deepest part of the ocean? Can I go there and hear nothing about anything, or will the other human-hewn waves, of radio and HD and satellite and cellphones sift their way downwards, where the information (sinking and clinging to the side of chinese Hannah Montana flotsam like the opposite of white blood cells) reveals itself to be a revolution of no reveal, late-breaking news both late and broken, unmissible and unmissed. Can we pour the emptiness, or fullness, of these days into this trench of deep, imaginary, sweet stasis?

Where am I going with all of this? Now you ask! OK, let's say you are holding a live wire and you wish to describe it. You hold it in your hands and it rattles your brain, melts the rings on your fingers, and rolls your eyes back into your head. Though you are robustly aware of an undeniable feeling of live-wire-ness, you'll likely have trouble coherently depicting this feeling. It's a lot like life. The experience itself has made unreliable your testimony of the experience.

It's sometimes said that your freedom ends where my nose begins. Personal boundaries are imaginary but certainly real. Personal space varies by culture - Latin cultures require less, European more. Cut me in half, though, and it would reveal more about me than about you, I imagine. The equator divides as it conjoins. But it doesn't properly exist, so no, it's not like us at all.

Another September Song

Now on this stage the planes alight, a sweeping and a shape,
the turning screws of another time tightening.
Hectoring drops of rain or sweat crash and splatter
and disappear, a hot griddle these thoughts, this time, alive.

We sweet, we offer this ripeness soon desiccant,
parenthetical fringes on autumn's billowy blade,
lowering light on the breakwaters, fading
into sharp relief, cold comfort, and hard candy.
It's this answer that reminds you to ask...

Smiling and circumspect,
watching the buses go by -
tectonic weights of why? and OK, and so? and so not.
If these wounds are treated, if they are at all,
they are treated as a dog at the heels,
down there at the heels.

Sometimes these layers fall away
and the hands of the clock fall off, reaching up
for you to catch them;
or they will catch you.
Anyway, someone will be caught.

The last cone flowers dust the last bees' knees
and here we stand, always within
and beckoned, to the fuzzy orange distance,
and there we go, always without.
That head of steam,
these feet of thunder,
this sweetlight portrait.

A little circle

I wish I were smarter -
Why didn't my wish come true?
I wish I were dumber -
Then I could believe in wishes.