Just Because

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

Is the first cell
that splintered into fusion
following the black path of the atom
still inside me?

Like rings in a tree
are there layers laced
beneath my surface
that formed during the social drought
of my teens?

Are my last good credit score twenties
still swiping cards for bills inside me or beside me
is the kid I once was hiding
waiting
for some impossible seeker to find.

When thirty-five year old
tired and self described wise
lets eyes wander and retire
does that ring on my index finger
pierced through the brow
or the split lip of my former self
see an opportunity?

A take-over.
And thirty-five year old I
deny and declare some crack up
like I don’t know what that was
where that came from
I might even say
it wasn’t me.

Albeit was.
When I was thirteen
and mean
just because.

Pull. (part 2 of 3)

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

All of our mass is here in the proton and neutron. They are together in the nucleus, but distinguished from one another, for example, one is electric, and one is, as far as can be seen, not. The proton pushes, positively charged, like a young dad with bulging arms carrying all the beach toys, neutrons follow his lead and hug his wake and bask his shadow all in tow. But he put his call over the ocean. Heard it answered. A push to pull, a negative to his positive, a farmer for the garden, the electron may very well be the only seed God planted before it slank back into the hammock that rocks above every barrier the beanstalk never broke. Yet.

Am I Jack? Climbing a hairy vine wrists wrapped in red rash, pulling, pushing, hiding when I have to, searching for a slithering piece of snake-like thread that unravels this shape and pulls it apart so completely, such a threat, the giant feels its hammock shift among the swayless trees, in the windless ether of the realm of all-observance, where life was once a dream, but now we’re hushed, because its favorite show is on the tv screen, I scream so that it finally drops both feet and shakes this blanket of blank grass and weeds we’ve been scattered across like a fist full of seeds. I will make the farmer show face and explain itself.

I don’t believe the answer can be found the way one can trace and track the color of a flower to the nutrients in the soil. Because of flaws in the equipment. Because of the limitations of perspective. Our minds weren’t molded to uncover transcendental, universal understanding and Truth. Just survival. That’s all.

To achieve enlightenment we busted apart a telescope and took out the bulbous lens and until now we’ve only been using it to burn ants. 

Push. (part 1 of 3)

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

Push. Pull. Hide.
I’ve been thinking about atoms again.
I’m thinking that they are alive.
They do things. They push. They pull. They hide.
Just those three things. Almost the same as me.
We fight. Take flight. Or die.
These three fundamental directions are the primary articles of atomic particles.
The invisible specks that make us tick. There is consciousness in the very brick.
So that the thoughts of this old house are like a roaring waterfall of individual droplets,
decisions being made by the foundations. The color of every flower was drunk up
from single cell mouths lapping the boots of Hades clean. Our eyes are the only thing
that makes this confusing. The brain has already drawn the most impossible thing
humans invented.

The straight line.

There can be three temperatures in one bottle of water.
Endless range within the spectrum of existence. But at the base.
When broken down to the source, it’s three. Always a trinity.
Never a traditional binary couple.
The threeway seems to be the preferred union of physics.
And all subsequent interaction, some kind of sex.
Conversation. Groping stars with eyes as light climbs deep inside your mind.
When you see something, the light off it, it touches onto part of you
and your eye converts it into an image the way mitochondria cook bread into sugar,
and it feeds pretty pictures like chocolate covered strawberries to your brain.
The light of every candle you ever lit, every shooting star, lives inside your head.
You’re pregnant with it.

Push. Pull. Hide. Proton. Electron. Neutron. I’ve tried to wrap my mind around it but it is quite like trying to define a term by other terms when all you’ve ever known is one term. It’s like constipation. I imagine it is like birth. Like feeling held hostage by what is inside you, and you know you will surely die if you fail to bring it forth. Why are the hardest pieces to break into pieces so obsessive over one another, why do they relationship so consistently in threes, so violently, hold themselves together by tearing apart their neighbors, or keeping their little triangular shapes but slamming jamming against identicals and forming larger globules and the eventual elemental structures which could in some ways be described as the ancient jagged originators of life. Why?

Not how. We can observe that. By pushing, pulling, and hiding.

The Daydreams of Electrons

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

We are so brilliant, and we are almost there, but essentially, we’ve calibrated our observational equipment around the assumption that we’re sitting still, measuring the movements of others, even on a base, visual level, when we see, we aren’t accounting for our own internal distortions. Objects appear larger in the mirror of self-image than they truly are. They had to, to get us to take our lives and labor here on earth devastatingly seriously. Enlightenment reduces the rate of survival for the organism that possesses it. They breed less, they’re less likely to fight to the death, less likely to be seduced by monetary gain and societal status. Knowing, not believing, or wishing, but knowing you are made of eternal material, really knowing that the life after death so many religions allude to is scientifically accountable. If you discard the seeds in every apple because that part isn’t sweet, eventually there won’t be anymore apples.

Your soul is the seed of you.

The sweet stuff and the tree stuff is too heavy to follow us where we are going. You are the voice of energy. You’re confused because you had to be. Knowing can be crippling. But there are depths to you far beneath your memory.

We are all the daydreams of electrons
born into reality.

Matter Farmers (1 of 3)

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

I have a theory. I am a stupid man. The only understanding I have ever glimpsed has been peering through the prism of analogy. Big metaphor. Dense simile.

Electrons are matter-farmers. 

Protons and neutrons only seem to exist in the center of a negatively charged cloud of frustrated energy, that has a pull, and a power, a gravity, and all existence as we know it, life especially, is a sort of sustained state of fusion. When we split an atom, the world will never forget what happens. Einstein theorized that if an entity could catch up to the speed of light, it would not necessarily feel like it was moving very fast, but more like time itself was standing still. 

That’s consciousness. The materials you and I are made of are moving at the speed of light. The energy we call our minds is as well, slowed through organic tubes and carbon based wiring inspired by them, but to the speed of light, nonetheless. Energy is motion. It is movement. Our thoughts are happening at the speed of light, at the very speed limit of time, yet it feels like we are sitting still. Feels like we’re not moving at all. We quiet ourselves to the rushing of the wind and slowly our senses are invaded by the ever flowing headwaters that fill our heads, and bodies, and the timekeeper ticker zapped by brain lightning into hyper dutiful obedience, all the way to flapping eye covers and growing new hair and salivating and literally every single internal life saving organ function.