Bryn Mawr Students discuss Architecture, and the Ain Soph (from an upcoming collection 'Kingdom Machine')

Jesse S. Mitchell

 It’s the isotope Megiddo, a little burr in our cell walls, makes us the apocalyptic sort
Also gives us eyesight
usually confused for spiritual insight.
But you look up and you get a little glint in your eyes, everything is so gold and so bright.
And things get so easily blurred,  all sorts of lights and halos of light, ringlets.
And you look up
And you look up into the sky and it is like an eagle is the sun,
A big ole bird filled with avian light,
Two big wings, one for morning
And one for night.
And we mistake the dark under shadow of its passing flight
 for something other than a collections of stars and nonwaking hours
So everything is dream, nothing but dust gathered in the seams.
Everything is sleep.

I lived my life, one dumb animal amongst a hundred million other dumb animals. They never noticed me.

So reads the post script of every once living story.

Now let us make careful count of every star in the sky, so to register completely our dwindling, our irrelevance.

Triviality.

I have the taste on my lips.

Let us go, every one of us, over the top of mountains, above the pits of hell, so to comprehend the pitch of the descend.

The fall.

Plunge.

Right before our eyes.

In these cautious ways, warily aware, we may make of ourselves something responsive, weave a fabric around us

Awake

Awake

Aware.

Contemplation of the hollowness, the vacuumness, the Ain Sophness, the nightness, the tiny prick of light in the hyperactive darkness, the pinpoint of significance superimposed over the awful comfortable insignificance.  It is our observation of it, the wavering glow staring backwards at our wavering glow, a blurred brightness in the deep. 

It is the deep, the big blue deep after all, and the unfathomable will put its cold cephalopod arms around you and drown you down or else you will learn to swim but even still you will eventually sink.  That’s just how this ocean world moves.

Awake.

Awake.

In this world they keep rows and rows of old Georgian houses, crumbling grey facades.  In this world they keep lines and lines of perfectly engineered streets, sidewalks and alleyways.  In this world they keep vernaculars and trolley cars that climb the steep sides of  mountain Earth.  They keep aeroplanes and helicopters high in the thin air, they keep cold air conditioning units blowing in the blistering heat of Sonoran Deserts.  In this world they keep alive in the long tentacle arms of municipal sprawls.  In this world they keep awake at night inundated in resource consuming light.

Awake.

Awake.

And everywhere you look, you can see the dinosaurs, the bodies and the bones.  The mastodons, the mammoths, the ice age relics, the fossilized remains, stalk and stem.  Little grimy trilobites from off some dead ocean floor, all dusty dry now.

so let us make a careful count.

Awake.

Awake.

Always awake.