A Time to be Haunted: our ancestors had no eyes

🌚 New Moon Poem

Spooky season. Skeletons and other roughly-human forms surprise from every other stoop & porch. Always a mix of tacky/for-kids and actually-quite-startling. Some porches are full of horned, rectangular-pupiled demons and dismembered body parts soaked in blood.

There’s a bravado to it. “Are you scared of this? Does this upset you? Not me.”

Maybe there’s healing in it. Look the scary thing in the eyes. Acknowledge the worst could come. Accept it. Move on.

Maybe that’s what this season is for. The leaves are falling, the world is dying. Let’s face our fears and shake them off. Dead leaves.

For my Halloween costume, I designed a custom world map sweatshirt. I will print out one of those notices, “this property has been CONDEMNED; it is unfit for human habitation” and safety-pin it on. Become the uninhabitable Earth.

Are you scared of eco-death? Does this upset you? Me too.

A time for everything and a season for every activity under the heavens, but it feels like the world has always been and will always be demon-haunted. “A time to be haunted, and a time to…” what? What’s the next season? Will it ever come? Does light exist?

Let’s at least be scared together. Light a candle for me. Yearn toward peace. Toward wholeness.

our ancestors had no eyes.

go back far enough:
deep sea dwellers,
clamberers through mud,
things akin to
slime molds,
fungal networks—
who needs eyes?

(early overture to vision:
primitive sensing of light and dark:
light above,
dark below,
if the light shadows—
run!
sink.
dig.
shrink.
flee.

light-sensing has its uses.)

our ancestors never woke up.
tree consciousness,
bacterial consciousness,
rest and digest.
chemical memory
good enough for most;
who needs a big central
neural control?
who needs wakefulness?

are we so different?
saplings in a world of shadow,
contorting trauma-gnarled branches
toward some semblance of sky

maybe someday we'll discover light.
maybe someday we'll learn to see.