By Julie Flanders
You move at the speed of mathematics
Measuring light
Particle or wave
Garden or grave
The earth opens for all of the young men
Who were too brave
Or too afraid
To say no
How you see it depends on how far you go
From the origin point to the place you arrive
The place you think you know
I only understand speed when I move slowly
In the indigenous wake of something
Long ago
As all of us are wound and coiled
Tight as cobras in an ancient basket
You have a question
But you’re afraid to ask it
Why did all those boys go to war
Why did a million score people die
Can anyone tell you
What they were dying for
In that mass grave of Europe
Rwanda or the Sudan
Was all that infamy and injury
Truly a plan
The false or the true nature of man
What are the mathematics of evil
What is the language of the evolutionary rungs
The ladders of DNA
That lead you to language at all
To the click and clack and disturbances
Of tongues wreaking havoc
Wreaking thought
The wheels of fortune creaking
The cobra poised and taut as a steel spring
And you open the basket like Pandora
Ignorant of everything
But your own curiosity
You are born with this primitive ferocity
And no one to blame
For the tribes and centuries
Of belief and creed
That spew themselves into religious articles
Into waves of consciousness
If they are only particles
You are chained by your belief
While you call it science
It seems no less story and no more true
Than any art
If you keep accelerating forever
And you never slow down
You are bound to blow apart
The universe is far too vast to ever traverse
In one life
It is time to live
You do not get a chance to rehearse
If you speak a clever language
With a forked and silver tongue
You sing the songs of the ancients
And shiver with the cosmic hum
Your best equations will never count
The morning stars
That echo mysteries all around us
And above
The soldiers who lived to count their scars
Believed the lies that opened fields
To hold the bodies that no longer rise
To fight
What are we saying here
We see these strange collisions
Wave or particle
And we realize it’s our decision
Or perhaps
Where you believe in fact and I see worlds collide
There is some syncretic truth
That will override the strange incisions
Of human nature
With its killer teeth
And we will lie down
And leave a wreath of questions
On the monuments of boys
There are no answers in this noise
There is no language to speak these crimes
There is no mathematics for these times
There is no truth in this violence
Finally
There is only silence
Painting by Steve Alpert
“Journey of Souls”
October Process 