Raucous Equilibrium Poem by gordon nosworthy

so if our cortices lack the muscle
to mine what life is all about
then why are we still out in the back yard
digging up the garden
archaeologying
to excavate what life is all about

the thing about being human
the same carrot that drives soldier ants
to donate their lives for their colonies
that same lures humans
to pick up their spades
&head out to the backyard to dig
&to express their efforts
mainly through spade fulls of talk
morning night &dream they talk &dig
talk &dig
salvation grazes out there as well
out in the back 40
lots of plaintive mooing and baaing going on
to accompany the obscure artefacts being exhumed

humans don't know what they're digging for
even when they are surrounded by it
&therefore what they are talking about
up in the big house
spades don't care where they dig
or even if they do
yes yes yes there are those amongst us
who crow they know
their brains are matured to the size
of those oversized ginormous pumpkins
carted to country fairs on the flatbeds of pickup trucks
…in general we recognize the enormous strain
required to clean &jerk those delusions
above their waists
the strain tells in their voices
&the unevenness inconsistencies of their behaviour

we are born without knowing why
we give our lives without knowing the rules
to experience breathing until dying
without being wiser
we experience aliveness without stopping
to question exactly what we experience
when we experience experience
while barely knowing who we are
with our brains grasping at straws
without having dug up and fully solved
even the simplest personal mystery

we don't know what death is all about
too often we forget why we're digging
even while we're digging
to some extent we can sharpen out spades
by taking a moment between chewing gum
&spitting into the dust
to stop &question
exactly what we experience
when we experience experience

all we know about living
is what we experience about living
we can't explain our sense of life
even when that doesn't make sense
we freely give over our lives
to believing it does
giving ourselves over freely to being alive
we experience aliveness by being part
of a strangely shaped &coloured mindfulness
yet still we somehow imagine
we know enough about everything
to spade in hand enter a room without knowing why
¬ be bothered in the slightest
about the bottomlessness beneath the certainty
or why we carry the urge to use the spade
of why we carry a spade at all