Our Personal Ascent

Today I post poetry about flying.

No pictures, just poetry.

(I could have included the first poem in my last blog-post about thorns under this topic.)

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Tangential Wings
------------------

Tangential wings; these gusts above us become
Our earthen wind; they descend. And those
Wings are seemingly aloft, as is all reality.
And perpendicular, parallel, are the thermals
That behold our flight. For, we rise again
Unto our dreams once dying. We rise to be
But actual in the shadowbox. We rise
To be but embalmed by such perfume. Oh,
We fly within our surrender. We grasp
The strange equilibrium underneath us. And
Upwards, those tangents and wings are made,
As we convert the circles into spheres. Yes,
But we are vain; we are conceited. For, we
Possess the wonder that is our precognition,
That is our potential now dampened, now
Surely lifted skyward beyond our foreshortening.


++++++++++++

Barely Above The Floor
--------------------------

Our flight succumbs to the wind. But then we
Betray the distance underneath what we have
Traversed. Then we become the syzygy again
Of wasp, of butterfly, of a bird dreamt of still.
But, therefore, we have assumed the sky
To be ours. We have presumed the cosmos
Was equal to its own glass. We have ascended yet
Unto those scalene circles, each dire
Despite our vertigo. And upwards we fly,
Until we are barely above the floor, until
We can grasp the window seen, until
We too evolve into our shame, evolve into
The tiresome swirl of gusts and thermals
Within this exodus of self from consideration.

********************

The Bird Within The Maze
-------------------------

The bird within, within the maze -- yes, it is free
To fly above the walls and gaze down upon
This puzzle. And questions are asked, but never remain.
Oh, why does the bird just sit atop these corridors,
Neither ascending nor attempting to triumph? It is,
I suppose, not obsessed with human contests. It
Does not contemplate the same riddles that concern
Our own minds. But yet, yet it does.
It only sees beyond the game; and it
Knows that humanity built this maze. So, why
Should the bird imagine what we also imagine?

Oh, it finally lifts upwards and stares back
At the turbulent earth. And it observes us each
Straining to solve life's labyrinths. And it
Has a question of its own to ponder. Why,
Why did humankind build such pathways? For, I,
The bird, am truly free. And I am finally
Afloat above our world fragmented into
Its trite occupation with our
Superstitions, with our arbitrary shame depicted
Amongst the maze and its geometries of
Flightlessness grounded by all such conjectures.

==========

A Cowardly Bird
----------------

I assumed that I too was the bird, that I was
Avian in my epitome, in my totality coinciding
With the completion of all. Yet I never
Fly, but in my dreams. I cannot rise to become
More than human, more than trite. For, I fear
The expanse above me. So, I remain secluded here
Underneath the clouds. I remain perched
Upon the artificial world, although
I hope to someday rise.
But now I am surely a grounded creature. I
Am surely wilting into the air, into the very wind
For which I long. And my death impends. But I
Am not concerned by that. I only wish to deny
My self-betrayal. Therefore, I am a cowardly bird,
Am a flightless spirit redeemed only by my wisdom,
Redeemed only by my nonconformity.

...................

Into A More Obvious Void
---------------------------------

As angered by dreams, I was
Again, again an inconsistency
Of direction, of destiny; I was
Again as angered by this
(A violet of every color) which was
But invisible and excessive
In any specificality,
In all reality (subdivided into
And) of miscalculated syllables ...

... In every, in each, nightmare
I only before dwelled within, flying
Above the ceiling of existence,
Knowing, but unknown as to,
That I have been but naive,
Been but a severed child
Waking ironically to the dream,
To again a sight of sharpest lines
Very much ours,
Our enlightened emergence
Into a more obvious void.

ooooooooooo

And We Floated
----------------

The fins of this insect were such lavish ballast.
And his wings were, as his fins, translucent
And somehow invoked by my dreams. And he
Fluttered and swam and flew quickly upward.
Yet he never breached the clouds, for they
Were indifferent and taunting in their thunder.

And we climbed the spire, yet we sank again
Into the broth, into the fluids of recollection.
And we floated, and still we became both
Beautiful and turquoise, became the cone upon
Where we have been erased. Ah, this bug,
It drowned in its own breath. But, alas, it
Knew, as did I, that certainty is obvious, knew
That the trajectory of ambiguity is complicated,
Knew that we each have been transformed
From aquatic to acrobatic; and thus we extract
All our flight from our wondrous but tainted buoyancy.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxx

In My Rising
----------------

My ascent was incongruent,
Was oscillatory and sometimes descending,
Was always condescending, but never
Perceived. And
My perception was staring into the psyche
Of this whore: Society.
And from within that cusp, I
Again attempted to rise
Out of my own creation. For
I hoped to achieve the purpose
Once denied in my rising,
In my flight always falling,
But never less than grounded,
And never more than infinite.

---

Leroy Quet