Make-Believe & Beyond

                            Signs

I knew the situation was hopeless

when the second thing she said to me

was, “What’s your sign?”

My sign.

Maybe she –

or one of her friends –

had stuck a ‘kick-me’ sign on my bum

when I wasn’t looking.

These things happen sometimes.

But maybe not.

Maybe I was supposed to have one of those

‘Hi! My Name Is’ signs stuck to my shirt pocket

with my name written on its blank space in marker,

but somehow nobody told me and I’m the odd one out.

Or maybe I wrote ‘Dick’ on it and stuck it to my flies.

But maybe not.

By the way, the sign I like the best,

in the abstract,

is ‘No U Turn’

a nice metaphor, eh?

but I don’t think that was what she meant, either.

I think she’s a birthday bigot,

and, like all bigotry,

I think that’s ugly, evil, and stupid.

Y’know, I bet she doesn’t care what I think, though.

She doesn’t have to.

All she has to do is know my sign.

She didn’t know it right then when she asked,

but no matter when my birthday is,

I’m just not her cup of tea.

Make my sign the one that says, “Exit.”

           Metaphysics

Sometimes it really pisses off

the child in me

that things that aren’t real

– magic, water sprites,

telepathy, matter transmitters,

and so forth – 

really aren’t,

but at least sometimes music

or psychoactive substances

or sleep

allow me to imagine

that they are.

        The Molecules

The molecules

inside my nervous system

dance,

and that dance is me

and what I have to contribute

to the universal soul.

In three weeks

all the molecules

in my nervous system

will be different ones,

the half-lives of molecules

being what they are,

but the dance

will be the same,

only incorporating three more weeks

of experiences.

      Sex and the Occult

I attended a séance once

when I was twenty years old,

having the day before

had sex with the young woman

who was acting the medium.

The séance, of course,

was a load of crap,

and I never had sex with her again.

A couple of years later

I had, for a few months,

the fortune to be the toy boy

of an ex-nun more than twice my age.

She paid some big-woo Hollywood astrologer

an obscene amount of money

to do my chart.

Its relation to reality

was on-target somewhat less often

than if its pronouncements,

which were mostly vague, anyway,

had been made completely at random.

        The Luck of the Draw

I can’t respect the intellect

of people who confidently assert

that there’s no such thing as luck,

luck being the unforeseen

random consequences

of billions and billions of causal factors

beyond anybody’s control.

Even attempts to control events,

being the cumulative

random consequences

of billions and billions of causal factors

beyond anybody’s control,

are really the result of luck as well.

The ludicrous fantasy

that things have been intended,

or were Meant To Be,

can be amusing at times,

but taken seriously is stupid and ugly –

something for stupid and ugly people.

       Sceptical Agnosticism & the Soul

I consider myself to be agnostic rather than atheist,

although the concept of the abrahamic god

is clearly ridiculous and pathetically childish,

in addition to being contradictory, anthropocentric,

contrary to empirical reality, and just plain ugly.

My problem with mainstream atheism

is its uncritical dismissal of the concept of the soul,

which seems to me to be an abandoning of scepticism.

Sure, it’s possible, even likely,

that when the circulatory system

stops feeding oxygen to the nervous system

that the energy in the nervous system

simply converts into potential energy

and loses all its data patterns.

It seems to me, however, that it’s also possible

that the nervous system’s patterned energy –

which could possibly exist as electromagnetic waves;

no one knows for certain –

could escape into the atmosphere, or even space,

retaining some of its data.

We don’t have the technology to test this hypothesis.

We can’t see television or wireless broadband

or other types of electronic waves

as they travel through the air

without the appropriate instruments, either,

and neuroscience technology is still in its infancy,

basically just tracking the flow of blood in the brain.

It seems like a maybe-maybe-not situation to me.

      Dream Magic

Air like dream magic

bloats the pale twilight

cool winds make people

think about gods.

I stay in my unit

where the air’s more consistent

and my loneliness seems

less acute but more hard.

You said that you’d see me

when I needed that and also

knew, as you did too,

that you were most unlikely

to return.

Despite the dream magic,

I know that the gods

are people’s creations,

like flower arrangements

and marzipan-frosted cakes,

but rarely so benign.

The night’s darkness softly closes

over the innocence of dusk,

caressing daylight’s hardness,

hiding banalities;

the raucousness from elsewhere

in the suburb and city

stirs up the spirits

in their godlike nastiness,

then subsides into the

air like dream magic.