Watchmaker

(audio at http://zinnzen.podbean.com/ )

There's nothing you can do about it.
It's not the light-switch. It isn't
the ignition. It started without you
and you can pretty much pretend
as you will.

Habit does make thought
easier, if
emptier. You think you
know and continue to rehearse
as if facility assured
veracity, steadfastness, meaning
or perhaps
beauty; familiarity or alacrity
warrant- if not guarantee-ing
purpose. It is enough for now,
and now is too much for the most part. The vast
acceleration of happening,
the exhilaration of becoming, the
concupiscence of each single act
of seeing --- it is enough
to moat the possibility of being, re-
enforce the palissades of endurance
with ricks of rigor-mortis: the
transmorphation of the forest into dressed
cordwood in close order drill. Remote
as the inference of life from the ticking
of a watch, or the constitution of a state from
the smithing of a manacle,
we speak these words to be
self-evident. A nation is just
a place of birth, a native
just a person born there, and laws
are just bayonets until you attach people
to them --- sharp but
harmless. There are constituencies
for almost everything:
call something sodomy,
no matter what,
and there are those who will
condemn it. In a world where life
is pain, death
is release. The frenzied yearning is
my kin and when
I can I absolve even
belief. But I stopped
knowing who to complain to
when I learned
they were what I had
to complain about.
If there is no such thing as a blind
racist, where is the advantage
in seeing? If it were
the lightswitch, if it were
the ignition, I
would know what
to do
--- but it's not.