Helter-Skelter
The Return of the Native

Imagine yourself
Born under cover of darkness
In the shade of an umbrella
Pierced by peepholes
Into an other-worldly radiance
That shines on coralline ocean
Lapping up the shifting shores of landscape
Flowing in rocks and water
Air and fire streams
Breathed in and breathed out
By life itself
As endless variety
In this place you call home
That holds and caresses you
With open arms

But there, at the edge of your stare
Where your home finds its limit horizon
Glinting with cut-glass precision
Is the baseline of prismatic structure
Abstracted out of kilter
A multi-story high rise power block
Splitting apart between seven floors
Each to its own paradox
Confined yet connected
Point to point
By a dichotomous tree
Inverted
With bottom at top
Bifurcating to lower orders
With multiple entry points
Where you can enter freely
From abasement
So long as you close the door behind you!

Once inside this glass-cut space
There’s no where for you to go but up
Beckoned by idealism
Of social or economic aspirations
Coloured monotonously
Red or Blue
Me or You
Us or Them
Here or There
Each a cut above the rest
Reached by ladders climbed assiduously
To the point where worlds collide

Far above the ground you left behind
In a room where All presume to be One
Suffocating as a Whole
That claims from aloft
To be more than the parts
Beneath itself
From which it ascended
Only to bang its head
Against the ceiling
So near and yet so far
From what was shut outside
Less than a hare’s breath away

Yet, deep in the core of this prism
Reaches the umbrella’s shaft
A focal passage
Receptive to all who reach for it
Without resistance
Lifting from base to apex
But not stopping there

Instead emerging into slippery spiral gutter
By way of which the native returns
Whizzing gleefully down slope
To where he and she belong
Together as children playing
In the light of darkness
In the darkness of light
Learning along the way
That gathers before into after
Continually
With no need to get stuck in the prism
That seems to cut a dash in space
But can’t.