Gemstones | Donovan James

All these roads
Only to realize,
We’re all addicted to something.
Trading binge drinking for mainlining
Social connection, sex
For intellectual masturbation,
Anything to avoid,
The immutable
Alone.

Enlightenment is just another construct,
For orphaned animals to feel in control,
Tribes huddled around
The ever changing fire of concepts,
Sifting embers of solace
From this older sibling of Original Sin
And redemption,
The nephew of evolution,
The latest revision
To cave drawn scrawls,
Projected onto
The stars and heavens.

The Ganges soothes
Mosquito ravaged toes,
And cows meander through heat stricken
Streets, gliding towards
An effortless zen,
While envious humans maintain
The pretense of civilization.

Somewhere, monkey’s squawk
Over rotting bananas, dogs
Nip at fleas and foreigners,
And electron’s elope
With different atoms,
While the spark of neurons reflects
A perpetually fractal universe,
Somewhere,
The dregs of the Himalayas
Chime in a distant roar,

They’ve seen this all before,

The ape ponders,
Do distant stars wonder,

“Who have I ever been?”

For I am a pile of mud made into man,
A collection of quarks under the illusion
Of sovereignty,
For a few revolutions,
Of this womb of rock and air around
The god of Fusion,

Who will I ever be?
But a disintegrated mess of energy,
All actions erased
By the river of time,
Enthralled in the grand diversion
Of culture,
Monkeys filling god holes
With status, trinkets, sex,
Or “enlightenment”,
An idea as flimsy as free will,
–an end,
To the struggle, to the journey, to existence,
Experience trimmed by the requirement of language:
I can only say one word at a time,

But the night goes on, and
The Ego snorts self absorption,
Exclaiming importance,
While Perception waltzes with grace,
Don’s the name “Consciousness,”
Shrugs:
“It makes no difference.”

There are no grand truths
Only tiny lessons
An endless snowfall
Lapped up by humans
Who careen thirsty tongues upward
Hoping.

Donovan James is a writer, musician, and cat enthusiast. He is still an idealist, despite a ravaging cynicism. He believes that the money and effort allocated to war and fear should be used to feed, shelter, and educate the poor, no human being excluded. His work has appeared in Commonline Journal, and Curious Apes, and has appeared onstage in Monkey With A Hat On, a Portland theater company. He’s also the author of the poetry collection “Saudade.”