The Pigeonhole Principles

The pigeonhole principles go thus: i) if you
        press a button too far in the dark, coloniality
        vanishes into a rabbit hole, ii) lock your
        suitcase at your peril, lest it burn the verity
 
Of all that is holesome, and iii) go where the flow
        takes you, but suspect the master's tools as
        much as you trust the baker's bread, squeaming
        at the principality of it all the way to the bank -

---

Guy walks into hardware shop; asks for the master’s tools. “What would you be needing those for?”, the shopkeeper asks. “To dismantle his house.” The shopkeeper – a girl named Audre – hesitates first to tell him that would be futile, but then chooses not to remain silent.

---

confined to open spaces

the political economy of inaction
is the poem
  it rests
  confined to open spaces
  dense in not being
is the poem
  inaction?
  confined to open spaces
  sense it not being
the poetical economy of inaction
—

by confining yourself to the pure and simple, you will hinder the whole world from struggling with you for show.

Chuang Tzu

the words & the bees

1. this is the interregnum, these here are the symptoms
2. this is the era of the warring states
3. the coefficient of injustice is two minutes to midnight
4. a bent arc of history is not a broken arc
5. the dream of the butterfly will connect the words and the bees
—
1. “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear” – Antonio Gramsci

2. The era in ancient Chinese history when Lao Tsu and Chuang Tsu, the two seminal Taoists, expounded.

3. “It is still two minutes to midnight” – The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists – The Doomsday Clock

4. “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” – Martin Luther King

5. Chuang Tsu’s Butterfly Dream parable

where is my deep?

“a tethered bird longs for its forest, a pond fish for its deep waters”
– T’ao Ch’ien

—

no insight, and science remains a conspiracy
of facts     chuangtzu’s

monkeys scramble with feynman’s possibilities
till the broth rings

true     rumi underwrites his love of love
with a misanthropic

eye     do the monkeys scramble to sing a
better broth or do

they slip into hanumanhood?     this broth is
my deep my voice

stem of artifice

an unchantable repose, growth of wrongform, stem of the artifice of weft, mismatches of vice

make room for me o woofer of words, works
make night my tryst of deed

my word, my void speaks no tale of false but itself –
—
“How should you treat a bird?
As yourself
Or as a bird?” – Excerpt from Chuang Tsu’s “Symphony for a sea bird” translated by Thomas Merton.

poem as hammer & chisel

the gumptious sage posits –
posits while

the bird is principally
unprincipled

in chirp     she posits the
undoing of

her positing     positioned
as she is

between a chirp and a hard
place –

—

Use the poem as you would a
hammer, a

chisel     put them on a pedestal
worship the

bam and cut of it and you have
the cult of

hammer&chisel     put the poet/m
up on high

& you have armies led by pen led
by the thrum

of beauty, benevolence, bravado &
truth (off, coarse)

Not I, says the I-word

How far does the knuckle need
how distant is my

ear from the parrot’s ruin    how
true is the lure

of wonder from the point where
the forest departs

& asks, “are you the stare or the
gaze of my ask?”

—

Not I, says the I-word
becoming is
begetting the I     the

Naught is the beginning
of sorrow     the fire is
the anvil’s companion

Even before the sense of
word began     Not I, says
the word-I/becoming/begetting

The consonant is not-I     not
weary of the verb’s inaction
as becoming/begetting     not-I

an ordinary infinity

the rain has tents to perspire in
the kind of tange lime has but
filtered for softness    the
flit of nuance    the bulb of whole

reachables tumulting themselves
into an ordinary infinity
this is but rain    this is but
the fall of kind words    timed

—

Master Sang Hu said, ‘Have you not heard of the man of Chia who ran away? Lin Hui threw aside his jade emblem worth a thousand pieces of gold, tied his son to his back and hurried away. People asked, “Was it because the boy was worth more? Surely a child isn’t that valuable. Was it because of all the effort required to carry the jade? But surely a child is even more trouble. So why throw away the jade emblem worth a thousand pieces of gold and rush off with the young child on your back?” Lin Hui told them, “It was greed that brought me and the jade emblem together, but it was Heaven that linked my son and me together.”

‘When the ties between people are based upon profit, then when troubles come, people part easily. When people are brought together by Heaven, then when troubles come, they hold together. To hold together or to separate, these are two very different things. The relationship with a nobleman can be as bland as water, that with a mean-spirited person sickly sweet as wine. However, the blandness of the nobleman can develop into affection, but the sweetness of the mean-spirited person develops into revulsion. That which unites for no apparent reason, will fall apart for no apparent reason.’

– The book of Chuang Tsu