I rarely write poetry, but I'm finding myself in new territory these days (divorce, new home and several other related changes), feeling some angst when it would seem that I mostly have cause to celebrate new perspectives and opportunities.  I've often joked that I experience this sort of distressed happiness because of my gypsy roots.  Friends tell me that this is the plight of control freaks and that I need to loosen up. This is my response to them. I've long been fascinated with the writings of the Greek philosopher Heraclitus. I made his theory of the flux the focus of my poem.

The Joyride of Becoming Erich Vieth (2014)

Heraclitus wasn’t fooled when people talked about “permanent” things. All is flux, he proclaimed. “You cannot step into the same river twice.” Now that Life has hurled me out of my self-conjured comfort, Every moment whispers that Heraclitus is correct; the world is permeated with universal acid. This is not a philosopher’s word game. I feel it in my ever-morphing bones. Everything. Every thing is a nonstop dance of destruction and creation. Every cloud, creature and canyon a ghostly multiverse, a sprawling swirling that runs through our feeble stop signs, ignoring these empty-shell words we try to use as hooks to stabilize our vivid imaginings. Even my steadfast dog threatens to become an ontological metaphor. The SuperFlux gives rise to joys that will inevitably threaten and dangers that will someday delight-- A roiling process that moves in and on in a thousand ways On both sides of our skins and skulls, whether we are ready or not. Failure to heed this fact that all nouns are verbs tempts us to walk with undue swagger and blurt out false promises. Yes, some things change less noticeably, mostly things that don’t cry, though all things eventually crack, crumble and re-assimilate. It is our friends, lovers and central truths that are the fastest fire and water: Even though they look the same from day to day, they are self-extinguishing works in progress that we struggle to know only through sparks and splatters. Trying to possess them is to try to embrace dancing flames and swift whirlpools. Act, we must. Judge, we must, or we would quickly die. We are told that to live well we must know well, though we are irretrievably smeared across all that is. Even that magic three-pound organ in our head cannot wrap itself around the impossibility of this daily task. Taking this plight seriously risks sanity. If only I could better convince myself to go with the flow. As we pause to drink water molecules previously drunk by Jesus, Cleopatra and Heraclitus, we become Fatigued. We summon up courage as a substitute for knowledge and we have faith that all Motion is Progress, whistling while rearranging our decaying deck chairs, convincing ourselves over and over that it is the Blobs in this lava lamp that are stably meaningful, rather than the process.