Cupped palms cradle the precious thing
Unable to keep it from slipping away
A fifth of the world's people
Live on one dollar per day
Between flux and fixity
The basic structure of suffering
Digestion at any cost
Our greatest asset attention
The emotional equivalent of carbon
Our neighbors the microbes and molds
Tunnel with gastronomic logic
Linking virtue to vulnerability
Such gravity as may be generated
Against the horizon of expectation
This vale of tears we call our own
Is less like proof than innuendo
If we possess the wit
To work with happenstance
The brain like a fragrant seizure
Composed of vapour and light
Awash in an irony that lifts events
Into a kind of anthropology
Among the vast machineries of destiny
The strong-willed child
Learns for herself
The shocking joy of the attainable
Something delirious
Turning mere silk into curtains
Transactions laden with import
Wheels within wheels within wheels
Ventriloquist: One who
speaks from the stomach
Hinting of distance and danger
And whiskers blown back by the wind
A tendency to wander
in the name of some beloved ugliness
set round by promises and contradictions
Each category has its rubbish heap
Dismantled before one's eyes
The constant need for snapshots
Shifts from sharp pathology
To a bemused hallucination
With cannibals
Detachment not as abstraction
But process of un-hooking
On the mendicant's trail
A necessary endlessness
Unmeasured, like wind
In the empty quarter
Each day directly met in
Filaments of latitude and longitude
The face in perpetual grimace
Ravished by clarity
Suppose that the cantor sings
The way that blood circulates
Makes the euphoric discovery
That all pilgrims snore
In the same language.