I saw that splendor in the burning roses,
the radiating trees on that day of ultracolors.
We cannot know what alien sensations
Our words blind us to, censoring our senses
Down to the world we make by our beliefs,
Always that sense of having seen
the incomprehensible reality Behind
the machinery that makes the world
All but a few believe to be all there is.
I remember the haunted look in Natalie’s eyes,
Returning home from the asylum where they claimed
to have cured her, when the voiceover said,
Nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendor in the grass,
or glory in the flower
As she tried to remember what she could not remember,
That poignant something, like a pearl of great price.
Traded for a mess of pottage to restore her
To the common world.
And Fyodor, telling
Many times of the aura before the seizures and madness
When we know the world is not what
The many believe it to be.
Like at Microsoft,
When the database and spreadsheet unlinked,
Revealing their matrix of equations on the screen
Like a glimpse of particles dancing their quantum paradox,
Like the Matrix world of apparent moral mediocrity
Manufactured by underground machines
Being attacked by psychopathic arthropods.
Trailing clouds of glory do we come
But not from elsewhere, from within,
Not a premortal soul descending . . .
Obsolete concepts blind us to the radiant truths
We cannot focus on in the auras of revelation.
Is spirit information? Yet every virus lives
Only on the substrate of DNA or CPUs.
Nonphysical reality’s an oxymoron.
So often we’re given only a glimpse
Of the machinery backstage, behind
The curtains of our play, actors not aware
They are acting, ignorant of the audience
Who also do not know they are acting
In a regression that regresses forever
In the infinite consciousness of the Mind.