Ocean. East Timor. Photo by Nick Hopgood.
No more walls. No more borders. No more signs that say do not go beyond this line. At least I say that inside, again. For the millionth time. Move beyond the borders. Peace will come when they disappear. Peace will come when we don’t feel the need to defend the hut. Peace will come when we see through the propaganda telling us to die for the hut, even though the hut is not threatened. No one is threatening it.
I wrote the following poem in a certain frame of mind that sought no frames. I wrote the following poem because I wanted the page to extend forever. The photo above has borders, but only if we can’t imagine. If we think, those borders are gone. I wrote the following lyric inside a poem inside a thought for the purpose of escape.
The Center Everywhere Theory Hits a Snag or two
And he felt or bumped into Things
Saw Things around him above him
On his ground
Off-white clouds painted the picture of limits
Horizons and trees and office buildings
Collided with his eyes
He walked on and felt houses rush up in the face
Of farther offs and farther offs
In his mind sounds only appeared close enough
To hear
In his heart was an accumulation of competing Things
But words on the page in his hands
As he sat on soft cushions
Made him think of the walls in the room
And the air on the other side
And the walls elsewhere and the air elsewhere
Swimming he was swimming beneath the corals
Next to a remote island off the cruise ship
He came up too fast and looked
At everything and nothing
He came up too fast and spun in space
Until waves pushed him toward shore
And the sun made him feel the drops on his skin
Salt water waited in his lungs
The sea smells waited in his brain
He walked down the shoreline headed for his hotel
In the room the book said he was a field
Pushing always pushing outward and wider
And his positive emptiness was his heart
And his emptiness surpassed the world
Again diving
Released blockage but he was
Blocked from the air
And memories projected back and forth
Seemingly with the currents
But that can’t be!
One thousand trips in forty cars
With solid metal roofs
And tight-knit cloth
The moon or the sun projected where?
But overhead the metal sometimes covered
Those orbs
Like clouds
Or the windshield dropped down between the light
And his eyes strained to feel the rays
No more jail metaphors he thought
But that wasn’t the poem
No more alienation motifs
But that wasn’t the poem
He felt the drag of laziness stop his heart
From going farther into the night
Or past his walls
Or up into the air
When the water was warm enough and the coral
Swayed like gypsies in the grove
Like stifled music rising in gray curls of smoke
– by Douglas Pinson
