Ginsberg’s Sandwich of Reality

I was reading Ginsberg’s book of poems – Reality Sandwich. That is what inspired this poem.

I liked the idea of snacking on reality. Reality is a concept, a place we do not inhabit. Science has revealed much but the reality is so much more. Our senses are limited and our understanding even more so.

We live on a thin skin on a cooling planet. Those plates are drifting around and we crawl about on them. A little way under our feet is a great seething mass of molten magma. Above us we are shielded from the radiation of a constant nuclear explosion. A thin layer of ozone and atmosphere protect us from a lethal dose of hard radiation. Within us a world of quantum mechanics flows unnoticed as subatomic particles stream back in time, exist in two places at once or connect in weird and wonderful forms.

I wonder what the Taliban make of all this? I know the Christian fundamentalists live in their own little world and pretend that it is all as it was two thousand years ago. The Taliban have an austere plan for us all. Theirs is a world devoid of poetry, music, tolerance or love!

Maybe love is the filling of that sandwich? That would taste good!

 

Ginsberg’s Sandwich of reality

 

I’m eating Ginsberg’s reality sandwich

Sitting under a nuclear explosion

Floating on a scum of solidity

Cooling in the void.

Aware, but only partially aware,

Of unfathomable weirdness.

Dining on black holes

Quarks and quantum thoughts.

 

I’m eating the bread first

And hoping someday to fully digest the filling.

Perhaps it will sustain me?

 

I’m licking the Zen of now

Salivating over my dreams

For they are all that I know

To be real.

Flavours tease my palate

As I devour the thoughts and ideas

Of all and sundry

In search of a glimmer.

 

I swallow it all.

I swallow everything I am told.

I swallow eternity.

 

I have the sandwich

But it is a mere snack.

Reality may reside in the main course

Or the coffee

Or the slumber that follows.

I fear this sandwich will not deliver

The absolutes it promised!

Perhaps it merely dulls the appetite!

 

Opher 21.1.2016

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