Beni Ransom

On the Wall-staring of Bodhidarma

Wide-eyed iodide-antioxidant-eyeing
iris, falling into phosphene
false imagery, opening, groping
for original protein.

Stoutly slight and subtle sights,
unabashedly un-rashly compiling cool chasms,
empty and light
crying in cold casual space, cacophony
dissolved in fresh resolving harmony.

Fasting, haste having died, hatred
handed to envious lords,
lofty chapels, and love-defying
swords.

Words come, go –
lie under sheets of scarred
unforgiving snow

pelted with bowl-shaped
holes, dead grass peeking
up – raising rhetorical thought.

What is thought, then, but
weather-touch, but moon-glow,
but light, but feeling supreme?
And what is killing thought, what
is the dying supremacy
but the innerness, which
is all but an –ism?

What is a performer, then,
but a soul who could bear tearing
the strutting symphonic sounds into technical
tricks?...who
can grasp the strands of uncanny pulse,
and, like a farmer with his goat, lower his
knife, deftly tearing
the soft throat of coagulated red
beats, until it screams fluid substance?

What are words but the gray slaves
of mind-performing ways – of sounding?
What are the silences but
soul-performing touches, of being?

But sweet wall-staring
idol, your eye-lids lobbed
in open air, stopping to settle softly
on succinct Earth,
planting tea…

will the heady brew –
the love to come, to be
together, awake and sound –
will it really keep open eyes,
will it really will
to guard our sound minds?

Or will it will
some Stimmung, some sheet
of sense? or of soul?
Or of their union –
the gossip-less “it”?

And you, by slashing the faculty
of closed eyes, are
live – always pressed in the atom-
sphere of self,
that Sartrean microcosm of
company.

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