The Rational Observer

I

Am I maligned in the sight of the rational observer?
Is my is, the is that ought to be for me?

Is my ought, the nagging ought,
The shared ought of the rational observer?

I think and therefor I am
Very biased for I am but a man
With my universal grammar speaking
And my universal bias inculcating, a man
Absorbed in the business of manness, absorbed
With my fellows, like the lion, the eagle, the rat
Their business of being, with their kind, armed
With shortcuts of knowing, algorithms of certainty,
For this is how things are and how things must be
And all made manifest long before me.

There is a dichotomy of seeing
Like the duality of the helix
Or of the sexes or of allegiances
Or our decisions to fight or flee;

And there are those for whom the is,
Is blurred, for the ought transfixes; and
There are those who have mastered the is, see
The is for what it is, and see the ought for what it is,
A cabal of biases;

And these are the rational observers.

II

The moment descends and I have fallen into weeping
And I know not why but that I must
Cry, embrace the cathartic surge and
Steel myself against the judgement
For there must be meaning greater than the meaning I know;
And the rational observer,
Who in my youth
I understood as God,
God the arbiter of why,
For what mother would lie
To her child about what is
And what ought to be,
Mocks me with silence.

© Rhett Talley

You

You will not hold in disdain the letters of my name
Nor paint ugly pictures of me with my own colours
Of being nor hold in contempt the prior emptiness
I thought we had made exempt of mention or acknowledgement.
You will not do this to me, not again.
No more will you speak of me or say my name.


(c) Rhett Talley

We

We were also here, all of us,
The many, the untellable number,
Into air or earth dissolved, returned
To the star.

We are of the imagination now
Nor can ever be but in the mind
In the mind only
Where we always were.

© Rhett Talley

The Throat

This is the vascular throat
From whose funnelled rasp
The red words fly.
Its blue veins pulsing
Chide with mortal proximity.
The throat is thankless as an amnesiac.
It conceals the vital spinal cord wreathed in blame.
At cord's end, the house of foul calculus.
I will hold them all responsible:
The dumped chromosome, the rudely small domicile,
The neurotic mother, the brooding father,
The electric-cord-whipped piety,
The evangelical superstitions brokered like elixirs,
The magnetic accident of arousing shape,
And the trapdoor megaphone
Welded to the roaring throat
Orating in repeating echoes
Endless as sunrises.

© Rhett Talley

The Serpent

Man is fascinated by the serpent
Even as it strikes him.
Even as its motion in the act
Avows the notion and the fact
That when the last chance has been taken
Only then do we awaken
And in an hour the labour
Of our last metaphor
Will be done.

© Rhett Talley

Toward Ultimate Cause

I have hoisted my opinion of a thing
Around the neck of the world; branded
My name across the face of its avatar
And O baby I will go far. What
Have I done? I have like a peaceable
Satan brought genius into the world
And am malignant only at the bending
Of a stiff narrative. And why would I,
A god among the throng, an Achilles,
Alexander, Augustus, the great me
I carry everywhere across my back
Deign to such an act? To what end?
To what gilt triumph this thick-arced bray of signals?
And you, O stranger, our having passed each
Other by, walking along the footpath before
The place in the sunlight unaware of the electric
Vibe between us, you who I loved;
You were never here were you?
O Traveller who chances upon this place
When this place is no more
What will you make of this little rip
In the black and bending fabric?
Make of these narratives, these testaments,
These accusations of consciousness?
The accusation consciousness makes against
Its audience?

© Rhett Talley 2015

The Fly

What are you to buzz about so,
Unappointed by me in the business of buzzing?
What thing of gods would feign usurp the true suzerain
With vile and bulbous eyes and mocking flight ungraceful
And twitching wings and drunken volleys?
I despair I cannot kill you any more than I can kill you;
Leave your blood and spidery legs and unnameable loathsome
Swatted pieces static and untwitching in blanker oblivion.

© Rhett Talley