THE BOOK OF MANGOS
by The Concussions

​Close your eyes if you wish.

Keep them open if you must.
The gallery, the city, the biome will persist either way.

Feel the weight of yourself against the earth.
The ground rises to cradle you
as it holds highways, rivers, and the tall grass.
It transcends time.
This is the truth of things.

The endless now
All there is
All there has ever been or will be

The past is a phantom
The future, a mirage

But the breath is here
It is yours
It is ours

Let it go
The clenched jaw
The drawn shoulders
The restless mind
the armored heart

Let them go
Relax your love

Turn to the air moving through you
like tide through an abandoned hull
filling empty spaces

Lungs swell
The body drinks the living world

The pulse of blood
The hum of being
A tide of cells
this very second,
rushing to your fingertips
to the arches of your feet
to the pearl of electricity in your skull

Even now
movement
renewal
oxygen

The quiet reincarnation of every day
You can feel it
You may honor it

This is an old song, unchanged
Since before the first of us
stood upright
and saw gods in the stars

The persistence of life

Your heart beats
You are here with us
in this fragment of the cosmos

In a blinding light
In a darkness without edge

A tree drops its ripe avocado
A flock of birds perches on a wire
Someone tunes a violin
A thing is born
A thing is lost

The present contains everything

You are a single pixel
in an image too vast to comprehend
A thread in the great quilt

The bell peppers are in season

The sun is turning hydrogen into helium
the engine at the center of the system

blazes fire that warms us

We simply change position
like winding gears

You are still
You are moving 1,000 miles per hour
on a celestial body

part of an infinite circuit

Ever changing
Never gone

Exhale
Descend,
deeper, all things shift and turn

You cannot hold smoke
Cannot wrap your arms around a memory

Let it happen

The universe is not unfeeling
because you are part of it

And you are not indifferent

Technically, that last thought
is history

It no longer exists

The past is a distant mountain
You cannot live there
cannot taste the honey of the past
Nor can you kiss the lovers of tomorrow

And somewhere, lightning falls

And you can’t go home again
because you are home already

Now
you are drawn through
hollow places
like threads through a loom
warping and wefting

The body inspires
and the body expires

You are here
And here
And here again

No other place is real
The moment seeks no leave
It will change
and so will you

Now, listen

Imagine if the world were a poem
It would have to be beautiful
It would have to be tragic
It would have to be filled with romance
It would have to contain each of us

Imagine if the world were a poem
It is.

The present is a great book of stories
all unfolding at once

You are rustling its pages
You are the great author in the sky

We are all main characters
in the book of everything
the book of right now

Next chapter

You are back in the river
rising like mist
floating above the current
Up, up to the clouds

sinking heavy as stone
down to the riverbed

There is no telling the line
between rising and falling
No seam
between here and now

Time is a parlor trick
The magician’s hand is quick

Look without looking
and you will see past the dangling carrot
beyond the spinning wheel

The past is a game of telephone
Neurons fire
memories arrange themselves into sense

We are telling a story in the present tense

History is a shadow
stretching across the sunlit field of today

You are never looking back
What you see is a trail of light
a reflection
as you remember it now

The human ego is a hunter
that tracks footprints in the restless earth

It casts its nets into the waters of the future
and returns home hungry

Release your ghosts
The further you chase them
the more the earth slips from your feet

Time does not move
We do

Breathe
The air is older than the city
older than the land
older than the sea
cradling the peninsula

It has passed through forests
that are no longer forests

And still, it is yours
new again

neither born nor vanished
transformed

It has always been
It will always be

One long ecstatic now
Process oriented

The body sheds what it no longer holds
carbon
warmth
fragments of you
slipping into the unseen

This breath
will never come again

And yet, another takes its place
And another

The bones shift
The muscles loosen

The body
this impermanent arrangement
is the river you are standing in

Cells regenerate
becoming air
becoming part of something else

The body moves forward
dissolving and remaking itself

Dust
gathers in the corners of the room
in quiet places where no one looks

You are floating in beams of sunlight

The past is only real
in the heat of your skin

The future is not ahead of us

There is no alternative to now

The present is vast
and it responds only to change

So change

Darling observer

Picture yourself here, listening
Notice the room

The invisible particles
The breath of others, vast in silence
The light

Art on the walls
Contemporary

All art is contemporary
It belongs to the present moment
like you belong to it

Now, listen
A dog barks in the distance
Two clouds scrape together in ecstasy
The Milky Way turns
A coffee maker whistles on a stovetop

Open your eyes

You are different now
And now
And now
And now
And now
And now

With your eyes open
open your eyes