Non-Locality, Or Being Swallowed By The Whale Poem by Patti Masterman

When everyone goes away from me
And I find that I am alone then,
Everything seems to go with them; culture,
Society, understanding, patience, memory-
The whole world enlarges to an immense, patent blankness
Of which I am no longer a point at the center,
And I find I must fight my way through waves of inertia,
An abstraction which swallows me whole, like a fish
Until there comes a feeling that I no longer exist.

I must be somewhere on the outskirts of non-locality,
Something so large, that saying I am in the outer reaches
Is almost laughable, and everything shrinks away from me
As I wander from room to room, wanting to laugh
Because crying solves no mysteries, and because
I know as soon as I am no longer alone again,
Everything will come back again, just as it was before-
Even though I can no longer rely upon it.

(When the whale swallowed Jonah, he no longer knew
Exactly where he was, only that he was within the whale)