I am Human, I am the Stars

Your body is a vessel with which

to capture the universe,

to trap experience:

never forget that.

Light has travelled for eight minutes

from the surface of the sun,

taking years to travel thorugh the tumult

of plasma, from centre to surface.

It beams through the atmosphere,

is ricocheted like a comic bullet,

its colour hitting the back of the eye,

rods and cones interpreting

this wavelength of nothingness.

The energy is translated into an image,
upside down and back to front
flipped over in the brain's acrobatics:
the universe goes from chaotic mess of waves

to solid outlines, like ghosts being captured on film,

and these ghosts haunt us with their beauty.
Light is reflected, off apples, green as garden snakes,

trees and buildings, the downy skin of your lover's nape,

all other wavelengths either scattered, or absorbed,

for the various chemical tricks of nature's high jinx.

And alongside images, sounds, the

slight movements of air, waves

sounding off against the ear drums like

dark, ignorant armies clashing by night,

alight, arriving in our heads like immigrants.

Sights and sounds become experience,

experience becomes learning, bolstering instinct,

and, somewhere, hidden like a child

mischievous behind a curtain,

this divination jumps into the skin of memory.

The human body is a vessel for the universe,

a way for creation to know itself.

The mind is the world in miniature,

a model of all that we'll ever know, all

that will ever be - right inside our heads.

It's almost too perfect. But don't be fooled:

from chaos comes pattern, from pattern comes system,

from system comes creation, and from creation

comes destiny. And so the stars that made us

are now looked upon by their long-lost children.

This stardust gazes up upon the heavens by night,

and a tear falls gently as the universe heaves with a knowing,

as the universe cries out silently

in amazement: I am human, I am the stars....