Valentine’s Day

I

I do not understand duality.
To be together, but apart, separate and whole,
Total and in pieces.
Varied and uniform.
All time simultaneous and existence bound by time.
Nothing exists in everything and everything in nothing.

I asked civilization for help.
It was not until I grew up that I realized civilization
Was a young woman in a halter top.

“Go into the corner and behave yourself,” she told me.
When I was a child, she seemed so old.

II

An ancient god came to visit me on Saturday afternoon.
“I cannot live in the present,” I told him.
He had horns, an enormous penis, and smelled like a goat.
“Neither can I,” he said. “To live in the present is to be dead.”

We drank champagne and made a toast to the future.
“Since you are a god,” I said, “you must know when I will die.”
“Of course,” he replied. “A nurse will give you the wrong medication
When you are eighty-six years old.”

When my wife came home I told her about the ancient god.
“What is he like?” she asked.
“He smells like a goat.”
“Big deal,” she said. “So do you.”

III

The ancient god returned.
“You don’t know what a goat smells like,” he said.
“He smells like you,” I told him.
A=A.

I wish I understood monism.
What is unknowable exists because it is real.
What is real does not exist because it is knowable.
Reality is what is indivisible.
Death lives in the present. It makes duality necessary.

I am alone, uncertain, questioning my sense of smell.
“Smell requires association,” the ancient god explained.
“Smell has to remind you of something.”
“Who do I remind you of?” I asked.
“Your wife.”
She reminded me of a grape soda.
Bubbly. Artificially tasty.
“Have you ever drunk a grape soda?” I asked.
“No,” he replied. “Your wife and I don’t get along.”

IV

What is inside cannot be out unless the out and the in are the same.
This is the order of the universe, but it is not a secret.

A god worth worshiping always lives in the past.
A god in the present is either ridiculed or questioned.

“A goat smells like cheese,” my wife told me.
B=/=A. The union of opposites is confusion.

Everything is equal to nothing for as long as we are alive.
Nothing is everything when we die.
Time lives inside of us and outside of us but it is not the same.
Time only pretends to be the order of the universe, so it is a secret.

“I do not like the ancient god,” my wife told me. “He does not grant wishes.”
“Ancient gods want to make you feel you belong to the earth,” I explained.

My wife did not want the earth. She wanted a sky,
Where the air is clear and odorless.
The heavenly creatures who live in the sky never die.
They do not care about smells.

V

Krishna visited me on Sunday.
He was blue, handsome, beautiful, far away and very close,
like the sky.
Krishna smiled at me and said, “I am the most ancient of all. I am everything.
That is why the sky is blue like me.”
He played the flute and my wife immediately appeared.
She wished she had met Krishna before she married me.

“He has always existed,” I told her.
“Why didn’t we meet until now?” she asked.
“Because,” I explained, “you kept smelling instead of listening.”
We danced together, apart.
The ancient god appeared in order to defend the earth.
He played a trumpet calling the earth to battle against the sky.

VI

Time longs for the present.
It looks for it in corners, behind the couch, under the bed.
If the present is ever found, it will no longer exist.
Time thinks it is human.
It, too, is afraid to die before its time has come.

“Play a song,” my wife told the ancient god.
He preferred to dance.
Krishna played a never ending song that never repeated itself.
Reincarnation became a circle straightened into an infinitely
long line.

Krishna melted into the sky.
My wife began to cry purple tears.
She made grape soda smell like sorrow.

I wish I understood synthesis.
The re-creation of the whole from what does not exist.
A + B = A.
C left with Krishna to look down on us from above the sky.