The Star Forest of Our Hearts
Even as the ghosts of digitized nations
slip through concrete and copper corridors,
trained to an algorithm’s lace like fictions
as nerve impulses skittering through warring cityscapes of disinformation,
we build
refuge out of the star forest of our hearts,
solace from a mass marketed desolation
that sought to quantify our moments of laughter and candlelight
into profitable data points,
electronically devouring life’s contours
along the splintering edges of nuclear armed surveillance grids.
Having waded through the shoals of synthetic tides
typing keys like throwing bread
into the rippling data of our managed distortions,
we were one slip away from drowning
in the hypnosis of an artificially intelligent destabilization,
becoming choreographed gestures on fragmenting coasts of awareness,
dancing our collective death
in an unraveling climate
to simulated music of the living earth
whose authentic chords we had long abandoned.
Yet it was from within fertile spaces
illuminated by the horrors of a centuries-long breakdown,
in the growing fractures of our CGI psychosis,
now wind powered, mercilessly, with the cobalt hauled by children,
that with great effort
we freed ourselves
from the image of hunted monster
into which extinction’s machinery had imagined us,
and opened to an urgent focus
into the cascades of solar musings breathing through us
as the sun poured itself across space,
blooming into the capillaries of new leaves,
guiding damp morning stretches of budding silver grey
into an earth memory’s grassy rock strewn hill side,
feeding through our eyes
warm flowering canopies
in gardens of possibility and dream,
where somehow
beyond the twist of jacketed wire
glossy front cover fantasies, hollow promises of roadway freedom
and second notice anxieties,
beyond the dizzy banquet of urban lights
whose glare stole whole constellations from our nights,
beyond school bells that recalled gunfire,
and camouflaged men patrolling the streets,
we found ourselves, somehow
scattering the regenerative seeds of our collective heart’s forest,
watering translucent growth in the shimmer of galaxies
that together we yet cradle
in love’s fiery pulse.
Luke Orsborne graduated from William and Mary with a BS in Studio art in 2001. Informed by a long term practice of meditation and reflection, he continues to embrace his creative side in rural Montana, producing images and poetry as a kind of life line amidst the existential crises of our time. He also enjoys the tasty body of work derived from a collaborative process between sun, rain, and the soil of his garden. You can find a selection of his visual work on his Instagram page.
Instagram _lukeorsborne