that magic touch

"Are you a theosophical kabbalist or an ecstatic kabbalist?"
the mad scientist asked, the hair sprouting from his ears in swirling puffs
and brain sprouting from his hair in an illusion of three dimensions
and hand thrusting up through his pants made of pants (with no zippers)
like a hydraic dildo ready to fingerfuck the world
till it is bent backwards over his need to be amused;
"because I suspect you of a theosophical bent,
and if you prove to be ecstatic we can have a much more interesting conversation."

I laughed at the arbitrariness of this dichotomy and didn't dance
to any of the songs I had danced to before.
The rain was falling like burnt leaves
around the edges of the sweat-soaked party and the mad scientist
was falling into that old trick of getting people
to question their assumptions.
And their assumptions' assumptions.
Ad nauseum.
It's one of his more amusing games and unlike the music,
different each time it is played.

Personally I suspected he didn't believe a word of it,
and was secretly a magico-theurgical kabbalist in disguise;
only masquerading as a mad scientist to put us on
like a puppet show in which he was both manipulator
and lead dummy.

Do you want to break the world to pieces and feign understanding,
or break yourself and fall into the world like a dying god?
Or is there some other path hitherto unaccounted for?
It is like asking "Do you prefer anatomy lessons or tantra?"
when there is a whole range of erotic experiences
that have nothing to do with the insertion of body parts
into other body parts, or with parts at all,
partners and partings,
as if feeling could be reduced to some mechanistic universe
of touch/ no touch.
Try breathing in a thunderstorm,
duality becomes just another
incoherent vibration of molecules.

Recontextualize the sound of text,
meaningless symbols become other meaningless symbols
and the record of the world makes the same
faint skritching noise when you drag unamplified nails across it,
even if there is an appreciable tactile difference.
It's all braille to me anyway, my fingers are already blinded
by the full array of textures they encounter.
I couldn't use them to knit a scarf they cry out
at the sight of the softest yarn,
much less plunge them into the world
and reknit the bodies of time and space to fit
my bedraggled and threadbare desires.
They twist so much on their own
that my twisting just gets in the way
and tangles the whole tapestry in on itself
till the drunken details kiss and break into fractal dances
across the rain-soaked floor and word-soaked moonlight.

If observation wasn't the married cousin of subjectivity,
or the willing slave of relativity,
I would put down my pen and disappear completely
behind the edges of the world's hands,
and watch amused this net of nonsense
draw tight around it's own discordant skin
till it squeezes out little fingers of meaning
like incandescent worms in the rain.