An Inky Ooze

"I sometimes wonder if that is what Krishna meant—
Among other things—or one way of putting the same thing:
That the future is a faded song, a Royal Rose or a lavender spray
Of wistful regret for those who are not yet here to regret,
Pressed between yellow leaves of a book that has never been opened."

- From T.S. Eliot's "Four Quartets," III of The Dry Salvages (No. 3 of the "Four Quartets.")

The moon cries teardrops of blood

as a foreboding gloaming encroaches -

its shadow-finger injecting an inky ooze

onto the sky-blotter. A zillion catapulting

electromagnetic fields etch invisible arcs

across the motionless vortex, skidding

and careening like billiard balls shot

apart by the break. No cue stick lies

nearby, evidencing a lack of prescience.

If you drop a pebble into a pond

you'll see patterns expressed in ripples,

though not through the design of your

intelligence. All apparent sequence, order

and plan in a universe with a single

common denominator - infinite

expression - arise like mental figs,

the fruit of the perceiving imagination.

Every electromagnetic field emanates

a unique perspective. No imagined

perception of order agrees with any other.

All deductions are equally true and false.

Tears of blood flow because we kill each

other over our disagreements in deductions.

Patterns only arise in response

to the parameters of hypotheses.

What you see is what you get

because it's what you expect.

Each individual reality looms

into view as a mirror's reflection.

As the moon's shadow-finger injects

its ink ooze into the sky-blotter, people

spread an inky ooze on it, too,

butter-knifing the air, land and sea

with the excrement of Jonestown.