Revolve With Me

When I was born in the 1950's

american culture was embracing right angles

poetry was beat

architecture modern in juxtaposed quadrangles

every size and proportion of blocks

built geometric puzzles and art

explained itself in grids of

white and black, or color.

Everything could be broken down

to golden rectangles in the end.

But that logic escaped us

as we discovered that smaller then tinier

and deeper and grander

and even more expansive

elements of the universe were

swirling into fractals of

spirals and coils and curves.

We can no longer compartmentalize our lives

As all the world magnifies now.

Every little thing intersects, overlaps, and calls to

every other thing we experience,

hear, see, know.

We are swept up in a whirl of voices

hearing our friends, family, celebrities, dissidents.

Their siren song wafting up from glowing screens

and filling our daydreams with a cacophony of

opinions on every stylistic and political nuance of our lives.

The divisions are gone.

The barriers, the boundaries, the safety zones.

All day long their mash-up of thoughts and feelings

elicit a visceral urge to flee to the shore,

the mountains, the jungle... and experience

what is raw and un-opinionated:

life.

Come fly with me up into this

whirl a fight to swirl myself into

all of it and retain my uniqueness

in spite of all of it.

I now seek and sing my soul's song

hear myself and my experience

in my own head

just one decibel above the cry of public

and formerly private outcries.

Be the little burl in the massive maple with me

Live in the conch's swirled home

Circle the whorl of a baby's cowlick

and the rose.

We are spiraling out of control into the universe

of both the tiny and expansive with

a sweep of the arm with the paintbrush

with everything rotating on its axis

everything spinning away

and coming back.

Curling ocean waves ripple from

another continent wash ashore

and pull way back again leaving a trickle

in the fractals of sand sliding under my toes

calling the salty blood in the

tiniest capillary of my little toe

to speak with the microbe

in the tiniest tide pool

across the barriers

of skin and seawater.

Maintaining this dialogue that

ever expands and contracts

(like our pupil contracting to focus on the stars

and relaxing to see cellular floaters within its orb)

tires us but drives us on

with the fantasy that

if we could only trace the perfect spiral

walk nature's precise labyrinth

and speak the absolute truth

we'd be free.