Circular Journey Poem by Paul Kesler

You are somewhere uncertain; in a cave, most likely. There are no windows; no sound of streetcars. Before you on a desk is a fungus in the form of a human ear.

You pick up the fungus, put the narrow end to your mouth. When you breathe into it, the entire cavern quivers and a sound leaks from the walls like the drone of a million souls.

You blow again and the same sound emerges from the walls of your skin.

Then a veritable army of wasps begins to leak from the orifices of your body; presumably, these were responsible for the sounds you have heard. They have no mission - - at least, no discernible goal you can recognize. One by one they fly into the large mouth of the fungus, which you fling to the ground in disgust. Gradually, as they enter, the fungus takes flight, bumbling about the walls of the cave like a punctured balloon.

Abruptly, your body has changed; you have become a wasp. You buzz after the fungus which, like a housefly, never seems to alight for more than a few seconds. You catch up with it, then enter with a struggle: a hundred other bodies have preceded you.

Meanwhile, someone else has arrived in the cavern who looks exactly like you. The stranger seems bewildered, peering down at a fungus in the shape of a human ear. He picks it up, blows into one end. You find yourself flying through the membrane of what looks like the cavern you entered. Then, as the new arrival ventilates into the fungus, you emerge from one of his ears. It looks like a fungus, and now the stranger has vanished.

Or is it merely that all the wasps around you have faces just like yours?