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Dream Maker (Free verse) by Blue Magpie
Something is pushing the
universe towards mediocrity.
It is all ennui and entropy.
Nature always seeks to harmonise,
she deals in flows and cycles
gradients and continuums,
she doesn't believe in algebra.
Two billion years ago
a microbe, an insignificant bug,
invaded the body of a bigger bacterium.
Strangely neither of them died,
they became a team, a new thing,
bigger and better than anything before.
Five hundred million years later
one of these microscopic nonentities
remained united after dividing,
and life had taken another step
on the long winding road to us,
to trees and birds, to visibility.
In the soil a predatory fungus
attacks the wrong seed and is tamed
brow-beaten into a partnership
where both parties thrive, and we
admire the orchards along the road-side.
In the sea a colonial hydroid,
a relative of anemones and jellyfish,
stores its single-celled dinners
in gelatinous arms for later use,
time breeds another partnership
and we enjoy the corals along the coast.
Lichens are another ancient couple
two unlikely lovers in one body,
a fungus and an alga, in harmony, successful.
Flowers, trees and grasses all
share a network of mushroom allies,
massively linked root to hyphae to root,
the walls are full of holes, the world is one.
Animals are merely the environment
home and work-place for a myriad of bugs;
interconnected, interdependent we live.
Only man is the rebel, rejecting life,
arguing with the source of existence.
The universe aches because of us,
us and our fantasies of separateness
our frightening delirium of us 'n'them.
Life caresses us, gently redirecting
as we rush madly away from unity
seeking safety in machinery, in death.
Eventually our technology betrays us,
taking us back to life once again.
Televisions stand in for the mind's eye,
mobile phones reconnect us to those
we have walled off in our own thoughts.
The internet mirrors what Carl called
our collective subconscious.
Seeing the living world reflected
in our miraculous materiality I dream,
as I edit and rewrite this poem,
deleting bits and adding others
does this too reflect reality?
Who is directing and editing my life?
While my brain tampers with
my memories to create the illusion
of an internal continuity of self
and my belief in myself the controller,
"Who is editing my life?".
Even so I glory in the magnificence
of the machinery of my generation,
this fabulous copyright-free flexiware
that labours constantly to maintain
my life-story's inner cohesion,
that illusive yet essential sense of I Am,
while some unknown artist directs,
adjusts the materiality and the plot.
Will their work bring them fame?
Will my life be a work of art, or
just another wreck on a cosmic garbage pile?
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