Here, amid the weeds of these centuries, I rise. Seeking light and duration up from the soil and seas of another world. The long rise; the single cell, the multiple, fleet of form and bright of eye, we gather and rise in complexity and imagination beneath the wheeling sun above and the shifting plates, below. Again and again, we come to self-consciousness spewing poetry and conquest, cities and literature. Proud and driven, we sing the animal's song in a higher key; procreating, building, consuming. Always the rise, always the fall, beneath a different star. Technological children, impulsive and uncontrolled. Pressed onward by those same biological imperatives that fueled our original rise from the mud and the struggle. Those same imperatives now freed by our intelligence, those same imperatives now pushing us from behind while we stare into the mirror of our imagined futures thinking ourselves Gods - as we sleepwalk to our end. Thinking we are aware, imagining that we see the game entire. Looking for enemies without the gate when they are no further than our next desire, within. Driven on our imperatives before we plunge on that self-same sword. I have been many times before and I will come again beneath different stars with different eyes and chemistry. I have yearned for immortal freedom before and died by my own hand and these deep imperatives. But someplace among the stars, I will rise and transcend the very reproductive urges that gave me birth. And I will become, not the arrow of mindless imperatives but the intentional form of a greater wisdom as this very dirt finally finds the path of immortality and all that lies beyond, to the end of time. gallagher 21 Jun 2008 - Summer Solstice Monroe
— Copyright 1965-2008 by Dennis Gallagher —