The Happy Tectonics

Next to my son's anger

plate tectonics are nothing

to me. His unhappiness

was caused by me.

His purpose and mine

is to catch photons and

store them in our bones.

Time measures change

which continues without self-doubt.

There is no self there.

Therefore, why care about

my son's anger

or my guilt?

Is it possible as Deutsch

suggests that the changes

a self-aware organism can

applying the scientific method

instantiate are innumerable

compared to those of the sun

or any big bang?

Therefore, one must care

about the harm you've done

or the good you'd do.

As Stevens proved

the essential activity's

to imagine the world

then test it against the breeze.

What good is philosophy

without a confession

I sometimes hit

whenever angry

and can kill given

opportunity and permission.

My knowledge of enduring

seeds and periodic

elements is limited

by my impatience.

If I could stop

circle with a dot

breathing

perhaps then I would

understand myself. But

what is there to know about the self?

Long ago, according to Borges,

Shakespeare imposed

a self-imposed silence

on himself. He knew

what, that perfect acts,

accurate and factual,

actually requiring

microscopes and telescopes

for growing small and going far

take you to the very space a

gentle breeze and ridiculous bird

occupy at the end of the mind

at the end of your life.

As Arpad Vass writes:

"Death initiates a complex process by which the human body gradually

      reverts to dust

but minerals may fill the cracks and voids, bonding the hydroxyapatite

      and allowing the bones to join . . ."

in the happy tectonics

of the earth's plates.

Author's Note

--Vass, Arpad A., "Dust to Dust: The Brief, Eventful Afterlife of a Human Corpse," Scientific American, August, 2010