Techno Buzz
Headphones - The Double Prism - iPhone Six Plus
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Headphones
From all sides the sound cuts in, like a murder of cawing crows. With each criticism, they widen the sound, till all of creation shakes with the thunder of your sins. With their megaphones of Truth in their feverish hands, they stand still on a pedestal, their marble eyes of judgment ever-rolling.
You put on your headphones and walk away.
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The Double Prism
In ageless cowl or gangsta hood, he stares out from the double prism of the self, and with the flick of a finger turns the page.
An image of the outside world drifts toward him, unfolds itself into infinite refractions, this way and that.
This site that blows up within him, call it Alexandria, multiplies within him, like some arcane labyrinth of mirrors.
Now lines of chemicals, the light re-converges in his brain, condensing the myriad directions into a single image somewhere between the optic chiasma and the visual cortex.
From Wikimedia Commons: "This image schematically represents optic pathways from each of the 4 quadrants of view for both eyes simultaneously. It is a pseudo-3D image based on several 2D text book descriptions. I have combined these to represent both sagittal and coronal planes in one image. The graphical work is entirely my own work." (Ratznium)
The light that started from a universe of infinite complexity enters the eyes, travels along the optic nerves, the two lines meeting at the optic chiasma, all of which fires the microcosm of the cortex.
This leaves him wondering at the out and in: how the world without became a world within; and how within the infinite world within, in mirrors bent as one, an impulse travelled out again on a single line; how beneath the folds of his hidden brain his world came together once again, to stretch out the index finger of his right hand and turn the page.
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iPhone Six Plus
I barely got past the first line of the first paragraph before an idea sparked the idea of ideas,
as if thinking were meaning itself, and all that writing wrought was a magnified, unknown X.
I let others worry about the death of the sculpted rhyme,* remembering instead the words of the Kena Upanishad:
Not that which the mind can think, but that whereby the mind can think.
Know that to be Brahman the eternal, and not what people here adore.
I read images, pounce on colours as they shift from orange to green,
and creep around the words of a poem about poems
like the bamboo
stalks resembling
spines of books
on a green photo
on my study wall
or notes in the pink music of Mancini
verbs and clefs dancing on a thin black wire
or like a line of Sanskrit that reads "Sanskrit"
the dance of sound on gamelan rails
the curving images of words
and the words that sound these images
on six square inches of glass
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* In "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley" (1920), Ezra Pound laments, The “age demanded” chiefly a mould in plaster, / Made with no loss of time, / A prose kinema, not, not assuredly, alabaster / Or the “sculpture” of rhyme.
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