The Moon’s Dreams

On its nightly course
Across the unending abyss
The moon dreams too:
The moon dreams your dreams
The moon’s dreaming configures the shadowy contours of your very life;
While the moon’s beams illuminate the dark night of every soul.

Billions of years now since the big bang of this kalpa
With eons of entropy between us and the source
The tectonic plates of unity and diversification
Have been rubbing against each other since the start
Forming a massive range of obstacles.
The heat from that initial moment has been dispersed
And now we find ourselves clinging tightly to a fragile balance
On an inconsequential planet
The third orbit around a minor fireball
Itself revolving at a relatively slow pace
On an outward arm of a mediocre galaxy
Billions of light years from the center of it all.
Aware of this now for the blink of a galactic eye,
We have just begun to sprout
From an unfathomable gestation period—
And we have barely taken root in the ground of our being.

The path back home gets longer, with more switchbacks
As the mountain peaks rise from the relentless geologic clash.
And at such an altitude the light of the sun
Has trouble melting away
The compacted frozen sediment
Settled over the original ground.
Given the perpetuity of this ancient chilling truth
Only a little free-flowing fluid
Is released during each cyclical thaw.
And because our roots are only so deep
In the sparse soil of this godforsaken region
We add only a thin layer of new growth each season.

Yet every night fantasmic forms appear
Like crop circles in a formless field of possibility:
The proving ground for evolutionary strains
Never before seeing or seen in the light of day.
The gravitational pull of the moon
Draws out our precious awareness with convoluting suction
Into the nether regions where no one has yet to look.
Or into the next generation of the species
Drawn into a neverending story with increasing drama
An unfulfilled dispersal of what had previously been collected:
Such is the movement of the tectonic plate of diversification
Galloping towards an unremarkable finitude.

Whatever can be done?
To flow with the tectonic tempo of unity
Requires a backwards step through the heart of the sun
Temporally backwards through cosmic events
A devolution through the prior stages of being
Before the collection plate was first passed around.
To find your self all the way back
You need to swallow the whole moon
Reduce its far-flung orbit to the center of your being
Wax and wane in accordance with conditions
And make its dreams your own reality.
You need to take in its full weight
Accepting the gravity of all deeds and past actions
By creatures with webbed feet and even fangs,
When your bio-plasma was barely cellular
And your soul was formed of a more rarefied awareness.

This dark night of your soul
Culminates in a dense magnetic core
Composed of alchemical elements
Congealed by agents of the moon.
A singular emptiness
Like the black hole at the heart of every galaxy
Draws everything back to you:
An otherwordly cosmic vacuum
Filling the bowels of intergalactic wormholes
Connecting your very being with all space and time.

Darkly illuminated
The whole body invisibly lit up with no remainder
The branching streams flow out into the empty expanse unseen:
No blooming, no culmination, no moments, nothing more—
And yet, even still, the countless stars appear
In every twinkling reflection
Of your deep-set eyes.