Submit your work, meet writers and drop the ads. Become a member
'Twas the night before the Big Bang, when all through the void
Some notions were stirring, towards Darwin and Freud
Superstitions rejected and hung out to rot
It’s shocking how quick we completely forgot
Where cryptical symbols were sacredly spoken
The stories upended and images broken
From out of such Chaos, a chariot of Truth
An empirical prancing of paws on the roof
Now, Newton! Now, Einstein! Now, Herr Oppenheimer!
Now listen! the odious tick of the timer
From the Apple of Knowledge forsaking the plums
For probable visions and practical sums
When wisdom, by Turing, is put to the test
Then where are those letters to Santa addressed?
If coal from the mischievous miscreant’s stocking
Keeps motors of industry ticking and tocking
Then icecaps will vanish from under the elves
And Bezos will eagerly fill up our shelves
So with glittering objects and shiny bright trophies
We bid you Good Luck with a train of emojis
I.
At 3 AM, when prayer beads tick like Geiger counters,
my thoughts uncoil—copper-bellied serpents
tasting darkness with forked mathematics.
The mind's eye dilates. Space folds
like origami in reverse.
                          Here: the edge
where meditation meets vertigo,
where breath becomes sine wave,
oscillating between being and void.

II.
Two doors in the skull's quiet temple:
one opens on supernovas blooming like black dahlias,
one on atoms waltzing in their quantum ballroom.
Both lead down labyrinthine DNA spirals
to what we've spent eons fleeing—
that first serpent's whisper:
                               dissolve.

III.
Listen: the sound of synapses firing
like distant stars going nova,
each thought a light echo
bouncing through time's curved throat.
The heart grows dense as collapsed stars,
while dreams crystallize into sacred geometry,
snowflakes falling upward through dark matter.

IV.
Memory: that holographic river
where time swims backward through its own reflection.
I cup moments like bioluminescent plankton,
watch them slip away, pixel by pixel,
leaving ghost-prints on retinal nights.
Each lost second transforms me—
tree rings of light recording
what darkness taught the leaves.

V.
In the space between heartbeats,
neural networks weave myths from starlight,
encoding infinity in finite flesh.
We are legends dreaming ourselves awake,
ancient light translated into carbon,
into stories that birth galaxies
between firing neurons.

VI.
Observe the great devourings:
Universe swallows galaxy swallows star
swallows planet swallows society swallows self—
recursive hymn, eternal return.
Watch consciousness eat reality
eat quantum uncertainty
eat itself, until nothing remains
but foam on probability's shore,
glittering with all possible worlds.

VII.
Deep in the amygdala's forest,
where fear grows like luminous fungi,
I find fragments of cosmic egg-shell,
evidence of what we hatched from.
Each cell remembers its stellar womb,
each atom hums its hydrogen lullaby,
while DNA spells out in base-four code:
you are everyone you have ever been.

VIII.
When Brahman's eye blinks,
superposition collapses into now—
wave functions falling like autumn leaves
into singular moments of being.
Time is a spiral staircase
wrapped around a strand of RNA,
leading both up to heaven
and down to the quantum foam
where angels dance with quarks.

IX.
At the event horizon of ego,
where self meets infinite regression,
I dissolve like a koan in the mind of God.
The observer becomes the observed,
the cosmic dance becomes the dancer,
until there's no difference between
the meditation and the mantra,
the equation and its solution,
the eternal and the now.

X.
All is recursion:
Light waves breaking on consciousness' shore,
consciousness breaking on light's distant edge.
We are the universe's way
of witnessing its own reflection—
billions of eyes opened in wonder,
each pupil a black hole
drawing light into meaning,
meaning into mystery,
mystery into math,
math into music,
music into flesh,
flesh into light.

                    Again.
                           Again.
                                  Again.
Gerry Sykes Nov 12
Rubble and dust
spinning in swirling disks
around the fire
until one place
of greater attraction
draws debris to itself
and coalesces into an incandescent planet.
Earth and sky begin
full of promise.
Gerry Sykes Nov 10
One place, pressure, temperature,
The Triple Point,
aqueous molecules skip between
solid, liquid and gas
the salsa between states - identical.

No growth of  ice
water does not accumulate
nor vapour pressure rise
because the waltz, one to another, is equal.

So the three coexist suggesting stasis
while constantly exchanging substance;
a symmetry of balanced dancing stability.
Written as a meditation on the Trinity while on retreat at St Beuno's in North Wales. The triple point of a substance of the exact temperature and pressure when the solid, liquid and gas phases of a substance are in equilibrium.
Gerry Sykes Nov 4
As the solution cools
the molecules slow their stochastic dance
and the liquid is less able
to keep the substance dissolved.

As a threshold is crossed
the power of solution fails
and atom by atom
molecule by molecule
the substance crystallizes
plane by plane
layer by layer
the form of the substance
gives rise to a growing crystal
revealing in its structure
the nature of itself.
Ken Pepiton Sep 4
The practice, quotidian duty to the aim,
the goal, the offering of self,
will and all, in a hope some
witness in their spirits.
Premyelinated young adults,
abating breath, to hold a thought
zooming, to the post war mind state,
presumed to be a dank monk's cell,
peace vacuum, empty but of words
boasting in stories told of works done
battlefield conversions, witnessed
where ever war has made believers,
of any with survival will
to prove the experience,
practice making good enough,
this got to it state, got it, got the proof,
spiritual, mental marks of exclusion,
blank eyed stare, unforgettable visions, yes,
see here, in the tween twixt you and us, we

the lost minds used by many who once left
being, just left being
by many who once knew

the art of keeping bees can be calming,
I imagine, but never have attempted the art.

Most learners leave as users entranced
by the evidence in the dance.
... and with ideal viral at tension, let go, slow enough to see, if you let
the river be the same, you become the difference. This goes on for thousands of lines, worth my time, not yours,
re thinking the prize, just might seem wasteful of good intention.
The holding place / The tablets of your memory / Little slivers of death / We can keep finding ways to go further
keith daniels Aug 20
my body moves from point to point
- endless paths and promontories -
swimming cross-current
at the edge of a great fall.
consciousness lays wait below:
a sense of self;
awareness larger than itself,
older than my life.

traversing growing spheres from time to time
- moments made by difference -
racing at standstill
down a vast and shattered pane.
decisions marked in lines:
a shift in form.
evolving minds beyond our space
(a)part (from/of) all that is.
An explosion of life.
Jill Aug 15
Stupidly genius, moronic and shrewd people eat their fast food on fine China
Failing is vertical, errors are slander
Their gross insults impacting easy digestion
Hyperbole falsehood messiah

Piercingly silent and ardently soft people keep their opinions on fences
Insults are weaponry not to be yielded
Their platitudes cradling fragile personas
Perversely destructive defences

Classically learned and bookishly rich people carry their privilege with kindness
Science is built with colonial scaffolds
Their method constraining all true innovation
Parochial qualified blindness

Shockingly worthy and recklessly small people polish their boots with lead solder
Gravity holding them grounded and upright
Their bootlaces impacting aerodynamics
Inferior sturdy upholder

Gallantly serving and fearlessly trained people douse the political embers
Fire escape blocked with hobnails and lumber
Their pickaxes caught in the thick poison ivy
Nugatory self-rule defenders

The silent, the learned, the worthy, the trained people trade voyeurism for vision
Hologram values are no longer trump cards
Their gazes averted from hate-dripping sophists
Integrity first coalition
©2024
Zywa Aug 14
Politics doesn't bring

you anything, it's not art --


and it's not science.
Play "The Three Arrows" (1972, Iris Murdoch), Act Two, scene Two

Collection "Unspoken"
Next page