O Systems, Our Father, our shore, our nation, our set of rules, our sense of shame for breaking them. We are in his balls, where it is so warm and familiar, and we multiply each other to forge a community. But when the sea of Mother calls, and Father gushes forth his current into her, only some of us take up the call, those more adventurous little sperms. We will not all survive in the sea of the cervix. Many of us will die in our voyage to fertilize that egg of meaning in this life. But those of us who do succeed will produce a beautiful new life, a little being of our own, to wash upon a new shore, to see the light of day, to forge a new community, and commence the process over. Mother waits perpetually at bay, calling forth those adventurous seamen who will take up the call. Her voice is divine, is it not? for those of us who can hear it in the salty breeze.

We have wrung the blood from our stripes and the tears from our stars. Our Powerful Father has begotten and forgotten us. We had a mother who walked like jesus with swollen feet across the water with a race inside of her womb; roots run across to her broke home and we are born from the sea. We are born from nowhere, from a void, and we thus descend from this black hole. With a brief reprieve in the islands south of our shallow foster home-to-be we sank northward into the Deep where cane stalks balked at us along the gravel way and our feet, iron-clad and chained bled onto the small sharp rocks and our fingers were soon to shed crimson pearls into a soft whiteness of ungiveable forgiveness. When pigs are given dominion over pearls and what is holy has gone down to dogs and the headless carcasses of the philistines have been devoured by the foul and the beasts I will think of your noosed neck swinging in the yard; I will think of your cracked hands bleeding finely in the white sea; I will think of your strong arms, blood pooled blue at the fingertips, hanging at your side; I will think of your black hands mulling in the rich earth. The branches swing low and pendulous; the sea swallows, bubbling; upon a furrowed brow, how heavy the fruit blossoms, and in the belly festers … a hung girl.

fekku ragabe

Everything we see now was once compressed to a single point, tiny and dense. The universe as a unit, possibilities collapsed into a pinpoint, pregnant with potential. From that unfathomable nothing came everything, creation bursting forth in this promise of revolution that nothing that was once will ever more be, building multitudes of vistas from that one dot from which time begins, galaxies spinning out in a breathing ocean of dark matter, connecting us with each rise and fall to the most distant stars. How do we return to that place of possibility? How do we rewind to that moment when beauty and justice are waiting, balancing on their tiptoes to hurl out into the darkness, spreading constellations of supernovae and milky ways to light the night skies of our futures? Our revolution will be the ultimate act of creation. To gather ourselves, to bring everything we have at our disposal together, to envisage glory, we must return to a place of origin, a convergence, where we become so tiny and so dense in our imagination, where we unwind ourselves until we are nothing but molecules, atoms, quarks steeping in our togetherness, before we release ourselves anew, to build anew.

– Baijayanta Mukhopadhyay

we are as water; weak and of no consequence, always descending, abiding in no certain place, unless we are detained with violence; and every little breath of wind makes us rough and tempestuous and troubles our faces; every trifling accident discomposes us; and as the face of waters wafting in a storm so wrinkles itself that it makes upon its forehead furrows deep and hollow like a grave, so do our great and little cares and trifles first make the wrinkles of old age, and then they dig a grave for us; and there is in nature nothing so contemptible, but it may meet us in such circumstances that it may be too hard for us in our weakness; and the sting of a bee is a sharp weapon enough to pierce the finger of a child or the lip of a man; and those creatures which nature hath left without weapons yet are they armed sufficiently to vex those parts of a man which are left defenseless and obnoxious to a sunbeam, to the roughness of a sour grape, to the unevenness of a gravel stone to the dust of a wheel, or the unwholesome breath of a star looking awry upon a sinner

— jeremy taylor

1 If we are as water, liquid and adaptive, then we wish to display ourselves to the world as ice: solid and assured and unmoving—as a rock for others to lean on; but we are more like steam. The transient space of metaphor and image conducts reality toward representation consequentially producing a catalytic reaction, a spark, the heat, which commits one’s liquid life to vapor. Decompress, get swept up in the wind, dwell in the lungs of men, ride upon a sunbeam, flow down the stream into another being.

2 Sometimes, it helps to look at the sky when rowing these uncertain waves. Clouds may offer solace where water even fails. The decompressed molecules hovering up there provide the needed winds for one’s sails. Recently I’ve been getting so high that I can touch the silver lining. Yet even heavenly clouds comprise the floor of a cosmic sea, of which we are all grotesque bottomfeeders.