Justin Cocke

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A Schism, One Without Documentation

A schism, one without documentation,
one that must be merely supposed from the tattered patchwork given,
befell the primordial Living, ripped it from itself
so that species—the residue from that split—would one day
live among one another
in silence.
Altogether silent, but not invisible,
for the division was forever crude, edges and surfaces never softened or sealed up—
like most things formed out of violence—
and the veil isolating us from all others was pocked
and pierced and some light
shown through,
holes, gashes, cracks large enough for ideas to be
drawn through too.
Ideas but not thoughts.

And therefrom we
peep at what's nude and striking at first,
always only later to figure out ways to steal it for ourselves:
flight from the birds,
stealth from the cats,
traps from the spiders.
But the link to their thoughts, much like mine to yours,
is altogether absent, inaccessible as there is nothing to fasten to.
And thus we can never get inside them the way they are inside themselves.

Each life, then, is impoverished and held stranded, but, at least, sensible and understood as such;
and so we must honor the horrific, those early lords,
who, as soon as they gathered life for themselves, grasped blindly at the ravaged aftermath, in a place where opposites held a likeness in bedlam;
where they constructed ramshackle shelters and keeps, and devoured all things inert and poisonous in search of nourishment, for there was no tradition, save their fever for autonomous existence;
who created by guesswork and kept close their own kind as
the aforementioned division threatened to dissolve
the world of each to a mere insipid fragment, clod,
as the impossible unity was broken There.
Praise to them! for not all was vanquished.

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