and not even a constant, but all the time
being disgorged and sucked in again.
---Marcus Aurerelius (AD 121-180)
from Meditations (Bk. 2.2)
To go back into the past (pollinated to glow)
& discover one's body, shelled, the way snakes
throw their skins, locating the intricate axis, leaping
through extraordinary light, shadows' light, of
machine-like discovering. To find every path of
one's former existence as great lumps of frozen
pixellizations, hovering pixellated fragments
of every note, ends & innards of the body: feet, hands,
eyelids, the rows of upper & lower teeth, jaws, nerves,
veins (rope-like), muscles, partial segments of parts
undiscernable, &c. all stripped of emotion. To travel
even further into the past, finding one's body
fragmented to the extent of observing portions
of the body dislodged, characteristically free from
all logic, yet removed as if a place had wrecked,
throwing its parts hundreds of feet in every
direction, frozen mid-air, conformed to its space
as if permanently positioned. Fragmented, like
computer files, yet with unlimited perspective, slowing
down the territory. The traditional injunction to
"know thyself," in this instance, is a verbal corkscrew;
a visual somersault, a certain familiarity that
stands resolutely; seconds pass, leaving the conception
of the physically Unseen Past as blemishes
on the dust of one's incomplete accumulation.
If one were to walk into the future, however,
one's body, like an illuminated outline,
empty husks of a cage--a nerve-center of birds,
of boundless energy, vacuuming-in the coming
velocities--would be forced to the violent spasms
of nearly exploding, but at the great cusp of eruption
our present body enters into that space, each second,
before the future "gives way" like buildings accepting
the uplifting drafts of wind from the pull of a tornado,
scattering Hours like raw materials.
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