The Spectroscopic Soul

The distant spheres floating in the twilight void ask no questions, demanding no grand accounting or cosmic justification from the cold expanse surrounding them; they simply burn, casting their fierce, elemental light across the vast and oceanic silence of the sky. Yet I, being human – a creature woven of fragile bone, fleeting breath, and insatiable wonder – am driven by an ancient, beautiful impulse to transform that raw physical burning into a luminous parable of the soul. My mind remains a modest, imperfect instrument, a frail spectroscope battered by the relentless seasons of time, yet still I tilt its slender lens skyward, eager to catch those far-off rays and bend them into meaning.

There is a profound, unexpected liberty found within this very imperfection. A god or an infinite intelligence, possessing absolute sight, sees the universe only as a vast, unchanging monolith of total fact, bound forever by the weight of complete knowledge. But for a finite being, the boundaries of perception become the very canvas of creation. Because our sight is partial, our imagination is summoned to bridge the immense gulfs between what we know and what we dream; because our hands cannot grasp the stars, we build delicate instruments of glass, poetry, and philosophy to reach toward them instead.

Our limitations do not wall us in – they liberate us from the burden of absolute certainty, granting us the rare and golden freedom to interpret, to marvel, and to invent. The spectroscope may be small and imperfect, but it is precisely because the glass is cracked and the lens is narrow that the light breaks into such breathtaking, unexpected colors. In the quiet space of our finitude, human consciousness transforms the silent combustion of the heavens into an endless symphony of meaning.

Frozen in the Dark

The pale visitor rose above my bed,
her frozen gaze a weight upon my chest,
high breasts like moonlit ruins overhead,
the shadowed grove between her white skin pressed,
each whispered sigh a promise I might fall,
her laughter threading silence through my head,
and drew my failing soul toward the pall.

I could not move, could not refuse her claim,
her hand a frost upon my weary heart,
each breath a tide that whispered only shame,
the world dissolved, its mercy torn apart,
I felt the dark invite me to the deep,
its cold enough to steal my final sleep,
and leave no echo of my broken start.

Going Insane by Revolutions

In sleep, my mind is a planet orbiting itself.
Dream is the dark matter that keeps me from flying apart.
It cannot be seen.
But without it, nothing would cohere.
Like Aquinas’ unmoved mover, it does not glow.
But it grips.