Critically Rethinking Creation

by Anna Ruiz

I ask:

Do we ever stay long enough
with the pain to break through
our shells of indifference?

Do we ever unravel the Gordian Knot
in enough time to rewind the selfish imperative
operative
around our impenetrable heart of stone,
in our broken clamshells bereft of pearl, hard-
headed self-absorption?

And why don’t we know without a doubt,
without a reasonable facsimile of progressive
ideology in a conflagration
consternation and determination configuration
in a boxed-up metaphor, this alchemy of you and me,
ablaze in a blinding binding insight?

Being reasonably indeterminably intelligent, the
obfuscation passes unbeknownst even to the supporting
roles we play, inexorably linked to incomprehensible
and unvanquished nothings that pass for everything,
in the passing moments of all there is, ticking away like
the day and night in a land where time is but forgotten
if not for the call: Wake up dreamer!

And I, like a disappearing act, needing only
“the ashtray, the remote control, the paddle game, this magazine
and the chair,” walk away from you, like a stand-up heroine
in a movie filled with knee-jerk reactions,

end this Poem with no other signs of self-absorption
floating around in my ever-loving persona non grata...