Watch their steps:
rubied orphans, daily hoisting
the neon rafters of future
existence, and see them nightly
melt their worlds down to personal
scenes and fears.
When you look,
you will be studying yourself,
including the self studying,
and you will soon grasp for something,
an unbroken chain you can cite
to explain.
All around –
in the books that speak its hinges,
the purple braids of longue duree,
the tapestries of inner selves –
history (or its siren song)
perseveres.
What is it
that we need, or need to assuage?
Even now I tumble away
to look for the core of the core,
to charge myself to find the root
of my charge.
Whose logic
showed the outer bound of logic?
Who penned the words that slew language,
or endeavored to end desire,
or crowned the last king, who saw fit
to step down?
Are the tools with perfect edges — capable
of dissembling and revealing
the silk truth of explanation —
truly the very ones that built
this great hall?
Here and now
(the king has left, and his orphans
scurry along remaining braids,
fastening beams to each other
in vulgar truth-facsimiles)
is purple;
one purple, a moment’s specificity,
the indivisible atom
of braided time’s accrued purple,
the only color whose shades are
infinite.
Just a plane –
the paper-thin conic section
that cuts through the width of the braid –
houses the whole height of the thought
that seeks to trace the braid’s twisting,
trace itself.
Everything
that precedes it is pluperfect
yet still demonstrably extant
in the life of the thought itself,
in the structures of the moment
that it walks.
Purposing
the thought to itself, desire
to the desire that birthed it:
these are the mythic devourings
of history in service of
other hues.
Becoming
the master of explanation,
submitting to self-dissection,
knowing the total of a chain:
splitting your mind from the braid is
death-in-life.
Every Monument a Marble Janus 