Gobstopper Poem by Michael Maxwell Steer

We are many alternating realities,
like the layers of a sweet whose different
tastes we only experience as the outer
coating wears away …
the outermost
connecting time to appetite, to desire;
to the ego's loving and needing, having and holding;
to craving, to sensual satisfaction, to speed,
to the celebration of the eye.

This layer's pungent aniseed binds our sense-world
to spherical mouthfuls of ‘reality',
subtly masking its inner neibour - those seven
gates which calibrate extreme emotion:
innocent joy, knowing joy, oppressive
guilt, restoration, healing /release,
terminal anguish, and inner communion:
eternal verities of existence, archetypes
binding tribal endocrines in common feeling …

Beyond which, or within, lies the golden
vale of childhood memory, feelings
entire and unviolated by the power of speech -
a tower of strength for those who can preserve it.
As children playing in the dirt beside it,
happy or unhappy in our world.
little we thought of climbing its grown-up height.

Seduced away from its towering silence
by clamorous delights twisting each head,
how many feet retrace the twisting path
back between the spiny archetypes
throu the dark forest to the tower
of childhood, to climb in silence (and in love) ?

The gods, guiding shapes within the sweet,
dissolve as each new sucker enters their realm;
the winding stairs of the night-filled tower
mounted in ascending apprehension:
until at the perilous summit - the timeless vista
of creation calmly spread before us.

And what of the gobstopper in its final moments?
Dissolved, it no longer exists: the riddle solved;
resolved; and absolved of existence …
Yet,
always and everywhere noetically, it is
wholy nowhere …
Except where it always was.


26/9/03