The Eternal Labyrinth

Nothing ever leaves,
nothing ever stays.

If you look deeply
into your heart,
into your soul,
you will see.

If you look at
now,
ever and never,
nothing and everything,
you will see
that all things live in limbo:

up and down,
sea and seesaw,
accordion breaths
of vertical and horizontal,
of music.

Everything vibrates,
searching for equilibrium,
orbiting Zero,
that largest stone-idol:
absolute stillness,
yet the core of all motion.

Poems, too, vibrate,
rhyming outward,
rhyming inward,
searching for sheer silence,
chasing the impossible train
of the spiral’s return.

Either way.

For there is only one way:
Zero or Infinity—
two faces of one coin.

Either way.
Always the same way.

All searching
is the ache for a perfection lost:

like a headless chicken
running on borrowed momentum,
or worse,
like a mother’s endless search
for a missing child.

Like Farhad,
lost in the eternal labyrinth of longing,
digging the solid mountain
for ethereal Shirin.

Like a banner endlessly upheld,
healing the unbearable wound of injustice,
for injustice and continuity
are twins of the same lust.

Like a number
stretching toward infinity
while yearning for Zero.

Like hens laying eggs without end,
pushing forward,
funneling and fountain-ing
toward a lost core.

Orbiting being,

endlessly learning
they are
what they are looking for.