Everywhere you go, always take the weather with you

Hello. I am posting two poems now, poeming two postings. They are both borne, originally, of an obsession with the sensation of feeling off balance, physically I mean. Following my obsession with eyes, I started thinking about ears, particularly the way the inner ear affects/ helps control our balance. In preparation for a poem, I Wiki'd and purloined lots of interesting terminology and facts about how the whole thing works. Then, the other day I was going down in the lift in my building and sort of over anticipated the point which it was going to hit the ground, i.e. stop at the ground floor, so I sort of semi consciously braced myself, because it's an old lift and hits ground quite abruptly. Having braced too early, I was struck by the sensation my brain sent through me as it were: Almost as though I could really feel the thud of the earth beneath me, but not quite - Odd. So then I thought that might be a good connection for my ear poem. There are also echoes of my earlier poem "Uniting Bullet", particularly the Russian doll analogy, that is chambers within chambers. In Uniting Bullet, the tiniest chamber was the part of the gun where the bullets are housed and in Breaking Too Early, the smallest chamber is the lift, then the bigger one is the lift shaft. In both poems, the bigger chamber is I suppose the space outside, which technically must be the atmosphere, is that right? I mean the air around us, which stops at some point above us, becoming something other, rarified. Beyond that is the stratosphere I think and beyond that Outer Space? I find the concept of outer space a bit scary; infinity is hard for my brain to handle. I like Paul Simon's lyric: "Spinning in Infinity" - I think I've used it somewhere.
The thing about the "bigger chamber", the thing about the atmosphere, is that it is prone to weather. Weather is getting to be bigger and scarier, as we all know: Tsunamis, earthquakes, hurricanes, etc etc. All quite apocalyptic and more often than not caused by us humans. As Bill Hicks said, we are a virus with shoes... Weather and mood are reflective of one another, thus in Death Warmed Me Up is the line "the weather had, up to that moment, been indifferent". One thing weather and mood have in common: They can both be unpredicable, often frighteningly.

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Breaking too early


a body within a body, within a shaft,
Knowing the elevator would hit ground
with an unceremonious thud, it being old,
braced himself, and for a fractured moment
the body's sense of itself in space interrupted
the vestibule of inner ear tensed, mid-air.

Russian dolls: Vestibulated, elevated,
descending, relative to space, outer,
inner, each defining the other, necessarily,
airily, impressively, compressively, rippling
outward from tiny stones to vast column,
column of air, calcium to atrium, bone to stone.

As the lift bore down, barrelling, balling,
the man's mind stalled, cast adrift momentarily,
ball bearings cast adrift, knees chuckled, swash
buckled, no metal rods did though, nevertheless
he was impressed by the over-arching timeless
marching of molecules, how it was stopped.

Once safely thudded, gravitational pull restored,
Another impact struck, while he the being was
still off-balance, still weak at the knees, brain
swilling in its own fluid. It struck that while falling
essentially, really, truly, physically, downward force
is all in the mind - All the while the infinity mocks us.


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It's Getting Realer

Infinity is too vast a concept
and weather too diverse
for the tiny atrium of the mind to contain,
for the grey matter to unfurl.

As the globe warms, the pace quickening,
mother earth angrier and angrier,
we specks are cast about and woken
from our ignorant semi slumber.

We, now so much more than the twelve tribes,
now The Six Billion, each a vacuum,
each sealed, deluded, individualised,
the outer infinity invisibly, insidiously closing in.

For the physicist will tell you: the perfect vacuum
is only a philosophical concept,
it is never observed in practice;
When will the individually-wrapped packages burst?

When will the vacuum packed become
the ransacked, get sucked back
out into the space void
backfilled, mere filaments in a vast lightbulb?