WHAT WE DO FOR SURVIVAL

Ivy Ireland

Green was first when the extant set out to condense itself down.

Then cinnabar: capillaries of fire and endlessness,

a nest of triangles, symbols of the Three Principles —

the Great Heart of some elapsed thing.

The only world we can cope with

is this shopping list of perceptions:

Round bottomed flask,

orphic egg, Aurora Borealis, lung sack,

runes in cubes seeming to square the circle,

Tetragrammaton in a cyclic continuum

trailing off the canvas, off this Perspex page.

Consciousness is not the only node

responding to this inoculation of meaning —

the body catches the flame, also.

Electrical signals smelt biology and chemistry

from shamanism and alchemy,

distil human genome research from arcane pixels,

coagulate white noise with all this green-black rapid change.

What lies beneath this ladder of coercion

is still beneath;

scumble-over it as we will,

set it free though we may.

Ivy Ireland is a poet, dancer, magician's assistant, mystic, casual lecturer, harpist, bookseller, and sideshow performer. In her spare time she is studying a PhD. Ivy likes cosmology and wishes she understood more about quantum physics.