33.

Lamb’s head soup is in some sort of cauldron, but the real cauldron is all in the lamb’s head. If there’s one thing infinity is not it’s a continuously growing thing. A continuously enlarging finity I mean. That sort of never ending is what we come to call the over & done. The universe is not unlike the real world — the earth say — this body of ours that is all in your head. A chicken sitting on an egg is enough to shatter every illusion. Just now a little bit of me emerges into a nest lined with angel feathers: you have to really not care to feel this much: if you can’t help but be careful what are you being? Conscientious, comes the answer, a beautifully hairy caterpillar inside the ugly butterfly of consciousness. As if self-annihilation was a delicacy so priceless it became a tiny meal served to rich people, little more than decoration on a plate: if they were eating atom bombs that would be my kind of restaurant. What is the realisation that that’s all consciousness is? A footstep in the gemmed grass: worlds are shaken from their stems & eaten by the earth, worlds tumble from the skies making a meal of light, worlds retract inside their shells & do not think of waiting, worlds hear your prayer, worlds vibrate inside your head, worlds beg for what they cannot bear to ask for: is this your apology? Silence is that prayer which is the music of making good, the beautiful disappearance of your godhood as if the literal shrugging off of a cloak to reveal the wondrous nakedness of mind’s light as nature. You shall not shiver, you shall come as nothing into my arms & I shall not hesitate to break every rib of my words until my heart burns hot enough for you. Let us move now a little distance from it, the shameless energy of stillness burning still, the fierce strangeness of that fearsome cuteness: Look! I know you see it but when I turn to register my smile it is a window I am looking out of, a window I am looking into, my smile is a spacequake, a fissure through which I witness the universal baby shake, a dream dancing behind its eyelids like a flicker of recognition, the second thought of a mind that has never seen but that the spirit is what we are swimming in, every breath absorbing the ghost of a person like a sentence left hanging