Attempting to Explain

Listen. I hear sunlight pounding on the roof.  I hear light from a thousand distant galaxies, rolling like a wave of two percent milk, splashing against the siding of the house.  And I can smell the faint aroma of the Big Bang; like burnt toast being rescued
with a life preserver of sliced avocados and peach jam.

If I look hard enough at the sky, beyond the rising sun, I can see the splinters and shards of that explosive instant in which nothing—which can be neither defined nor understood—became the inexplicable something.

I reach out and touch the end of time; I feel it pulsing through my veins, coursing like the cold contents of a hypodermic needle injected in my arm to protect me from the flu.

If my hands would do what my thoughts tell them, they would create forms that explain what I hear and see and taste and smell and touch.  But they are unruly hands, hands that refuse to transmit ideas into images of wood or clay.  So, instead, I rely on words that can never hope to capture ideas so fleeting and so expansive that no page can hold them.

My words are a lot like poetry, but in different ways.  My words are reminiscent of Richard Nixon, stumbling to explain why in a spiral of lies and misleading sneers.  But they are better than my hands.  My hands conjure images of the hands of speed skaters.

They are hands wrapped in gauze and tape and hardware cloth, trying hard to write a waltz on toilet tissue, using a thick paintbrush dipped in hot tar.

But, still I hear the sunlight slapping and rattling above my head and I smell the blackened bread of the beginning. And I try to tell the tale as best I can. I attempt to explain how I see it, how my perspective shapes the world.