earthlings

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Things happened (phenomenality of emergence)
between them (interpsychality). Determining what
was their mutual authoring, a found literarity,
intertextuality by reading each other—
a singular intrapsychality after all—
one’s reading of their trace, our reading,
as if they gain afterlife by gods’ listening,
the legacy of we who keep what happened alive—

Or so it was for the ancients, relatively speaking,
because, in the scheme of human evolution, old Greek Time was yesterday,
before evolution could be thought, thus facing reverie as gods
mirroring more than [evolving] minds: explainability
flourishing in constellations, ideality flourishing in loves,
and as all that was most highly worth remembering, secured
in stories of what happened, somewhere beyond thought.

There was Icarus because we evolved aspiration
that too often suffers a tragedy of youth’s pretense of immortality.
There was Proteus because sea change in life makes old wisdom
seem to youth a chameleon trickster whose claim to truth
is too difficult to capture.

Truth of the sea said: The Earth is round,
and inspiration bears appreciation bearing humility
bearing inspiration.

Seafaring says: We make all cohering, veiled as otherworldly
authoring.

Things happen, growing the artist
into a primordial inwardness emblemized by traces.
Between us, a vertigo of self and stance,
intra- and inter-, liminality and translation,
avowal, scene, projection, and
flowering that stays ours, dying without trace.

Yet, they would be made into story, performance, and character,
displacing authorial culpability for pretense
in claims that to their story belonged the aura,
intimations, and susceptibility to theory.

In the land of bibliophilia, intimacy becomes textual
self-reflectivity. Growth is earned through finding betrayal
by life, no: text, self-undermining from which flowers
transportation into solitude, immersion, free venturing, luscious
transgression, and high conceiving of what may happen yet.