The Fracturing of Light
by G.D Lascelle
There is beauty in the fracturing of light.
Words from an almost forgotten song
Plucked out of context
Spin around uncommon axes
Shift into conformity with hidden blueprints
Held safe under lock and key.
Only a fortunate few escapees
Cords cut and tied
Feeding on instinct instead of cognition,
Are loosed into the wild.
Enigmatic splinters and splatters
The spermatozoa of a new creation,
Sprayed across the void
In patterns of prismatic glory
Look for a place to land.
Every known and unacknowledged thing
Is shaped by thought and expectation.
Embedded forms
Frozen in the act of naming
Intricate as fern frost on a glass pane,
Recorded, categorised, caught
Like butterflies pinned to a board
Are labelled in a neat hand;
This flower, that bird,
All the desired and rejected ephemera of life;
Cracked bottles, dismembered toys,
Half-rotted food,
Discarded carcases of consumer durables
Tumbled like refugees
From the back of a broken down truck
Are spilled across oil-soaked asphalt
The apparent randomness is just a ruse.
It’s only theatre,
Nothing to get excited about
Scenery to disguise the truth
Roles to pull us subtly away
From what and who we really are,
Self, submerged in the spectacle
Weighed down by what we think we know.
What are we to do?
Other than grope our way towards identity,
Emergent, unpredictable,
Done to a turn in the microwave hum
Of words strung out along entangled lines,
Ideas and emotions clustered
At the gnarled intersections of a living grid.
A sub-conscious substratum spreads
in tendrils of mycelium
Among the questing roots,
Beneath the decomposing vegetation
Of the warm, dark womb,
The moist home of shadows
Longing to come into the light
To flow and teem throughout
This humble matrix of identity.
Everywhere we turn
Enfolded universes of possibility
Are brought to birth.
They grow, live, die
And return to their source,
As we are forced to face
The unpalatable, humbling facts
After all we’ve invested
In our many-coloured masks,
Everything is infused with potential
That always was and ever shall be present;
Open to the outer light
The inner darkness
To the inconstant, broken narratives
And endless convolutions of histories,
Of futures that meet
Always and forever
In this endless moment,
In which we are no longer
Special as we once believed
but infinitely more significant
In understanding, we are one.
