Another Way to Know

Fixations are predations. They subject the psyche

to a mindless sway in which we say and pray

all night and day I-likey-likey-likey-likey till we’ve

drained the language of its juices and most uses:

dropping all but one auxiliary verb – the sole necessity,

demonic talisman, the god, the holy writ of “must.”

Fixations earn because insist on trust: they can be

trusted to exhaust and to deplete and yet forever

promise plausibilities of the replete, the unimaginably

sweet outcome in whose pursuit we end up spending

every slice of who we are: we hold onto a great gold

glowing chunk of what think is star – deaf to all

entreaty to do otherwise. And yes indeedy, darlings,

this becomes the size and content, then, of life.

We do so like its glow. Which for a heretical few

illumines a mystical purview: another way to know.

It is a star. Everything’s a star. When we’ve really

looked, we see we can be seen to startling advantage,

hooked. There are pleasurable purposes in claws.

There is peace that passeth understanding in

this pause. Release afforded by quite other laws.

It isn’t what we’re told, it isn’t what we’re told.

It may be, surely is, some other enterprise as well.

But heaven doesn’t seem to be a part of it, or hell.

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