Parmenides

As mist burns off of a morning as smoke dissipates when wind blows my words fade as you hear them. As truth dissolves into falsehood as birdcalls vanish into night these letters disappear as your eyes pass over them. My lungs release the atoms theyve captured back to the stars that distilled them. I learn what ambiguity teaches. Some knots will not come undone. What I dream is not what I sense. What I sense is not what I think. Some thoughts are mine alone. Blindness comes from such staring at the sun. A budget of fallacies leads to an economy of loss even for those whose wealth is limitless. Untie the knot of thought. Solve the puzzle of words. By that resolution to be born again and again and again in endless argument with a sun that comes up fresh each morning and disappears again each night. My words have teeth. My silences are full. My arguments are beautiful. My hand exists as a hand. My eye is as sharp as a hawks. I circle my prey and I dive

to eat what is under my talons until what is not becomes me to be born anew by the name I give it as it dies inside me. My mares lead me where I most desire even to that point where Apollo cedes dominion to a refugee like me. My horses strain against their burden. I travel the road theyve chosen preceded by guides the gods selected. The axle of my chariot sings In its sockets as if at the heart of all that spinning a pipe is being blown by a shepherd. Casting aside earths veil the daughters of the sun lead me to daylight from nights deep. At the crack of dark where dawn should be, at the crux of contradiction, all numbers contract to a singularity. Gates of stone rock above, rock below prodigious doors tower to vertiginous heights, concealing the kingdom I have come to map. Wherever I start wont matter: for the man who turns on the pivot of what is every step is the same in a circle.

Words are the arrows by which I pin objects down into the field of what exists. A word which denotes nothing is as hollow as a bone from a creature never born. Those who walk the way of what is not are lost and will wander forever between confusions ceiling and a borderless floor. Unasked questions have no answers. Unwhispered secrets can never be revealed. Without puzzle there is no solution. A lie unuttered cant be countered by orphaned truth. There is no other choice: what is, is and what is not is not. All is a unity into which plurality folds like the wings of a hawk perched on a limb just before it hunts. The doors of the kingdom of justice swing wide for me this road was meant to bring me good fortune as lonely as it is. All answers are mine for the asking. The merest wisp of passing opinion, the perfect sphere of fearless truth, everything is open to me: the ephemeral and the everlasting just the same.

I smell the scent of truth on a wind rising from the east. I see the heart of dark in what comes later. I taste the brightness that falls around my shoulders. I still the rush of time by the movement of my limbs. I hear the suns chariot rolling in its track back to the dark I know will come. There are no beginnings. There are no endings. The world I name is the only world I know.