Writing

Thermodynamics of Desire

Why shouldn't I yearn?
When nature has desire woven throughout the whole of her body
The flowers ache to be pollinated
Leaves, petals, a-quiver in anticipation of the bee.
The soil waits, saint-like, for the rain
Decaying in thirsty silence,
Until that ecstatic moment when the clouds break and pour their bounty across the parched earth.
So why shouldn't I wait?
When nature measures her moods in lengths,
Temporal and spatial,
So infinitely beyond my comprehension,
As a creature bound by days.
And must I change?
For if the eons, passing, make the tallest mountain low,
And dry the deepest seas,
What greater change must the ceaseless march of days effect on me?
Me - already so low... and parched.
Does time's arrow point in only one direction?
And is it straight? And is it true?
Does it abhor the simple?
And wind onward, onward,
Ever toward the more complex?
Closing in on entropy, like Achilles on the tortoise.
And can all my yearning
And the sum of all days spent waiting
Ever be satiated fully?
Leaving me, without the tensions of desire,
And anticipation of fulfillment,
A simpler man.
Or will I find that I have been infiltrated and conquered
By nature's wily processes,
And that, like the cosmos,
And every one of its inhabitants,
While waiting I've evolved?

© Nik Kane 2008

 
Metabolism

How is it that my soul does not evaporate
With the heat of my flesh
And the fire of its sins
Made hotter by perverse desire?
And knowing the soul's distaste
For pleasures of the flesh,
How the body cries out for punishment
Making the mortifying flames senseless
And perverting their justice.
Oblivious to the ethereal beauty
Of the sublime nature of its prisoner,
Yet not content to serve as any mere prison cell,
The body has sadistic ambitions.
It aspires to be nothing less than a torture chamber
In which the soul is mortified
And thus transformed into degraded matter.
The body knows the processes of metabolism well.
It may be all that it knows:
To take something other in,
Degrade it, rob it of its essence
And use this retrograde substance to build more flesh.
The flesh knows hunger
It wants to consume and thereby to assimilate.
What did the gods expect when they bound the soul with flesh
Then taught the flesh hunger.
It was hopeless from the beginning for the sweet immaterial soul,
Born in the jaws of its enemy
Then taught to hunger for freedom
And ordered to resist
In vain.

© Nik Kane 2014


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