stop /stɒp/
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Stop Moralizing the little things like toddlers tying shoes or what milk to choose Obsessive bifurcation Ontological constructions of how the apples must be stacked As if wrong is a sharp cliff We drop to after I floored the gas for a car chase stop with the endless corrections Of this is how it’s pronounced This is how the seeds are sown Even worse, this is how you’ll heal that wound Consider how saving is not our mission Remember that misstepping is a wilderness reclaiming spirit space it already owns Remember that what you know isn’t yours That your body’s edges bleed Not bloody But rippling Into structures holding, enmeshing us all There is no delineation Don’t you see that whenever you place effort into clarity you obscure the magic of writing a grocery list and folding it into your pocket before the ink dries the captivity of being gutted Microbial longings the unknowns that wont allow organization for or against Adding to a whole other ledger of equations Ask instead what makes your moralities more impose-able on another? What is the difference you can’t live with? Ask yourself what is taken from you if you listen to how they like to be held at night Where they want to cry their tears What languages their tongues love what keeps their roots steady their leaves reaching tall Sitting across from those who breathe oxygen while inhaling CO2 what do you learn? No tree asks us to become more barked it simply is Giving Living Minding circular businesses gently So why don't we?
do not take this to mean that ethics are not critically enactable. take it to mean there is grammar ~both granular and wide~ beyond our understanding. that moralities are not lectures but love lived relationally. that this poem emerges from the end of the world practices of mbari. it sprouted from the richness of the longest night. with what gets seeded and grows in brilliant darkness. from the longings in marie howe's singularity
