SMOKE DANCE - I

October 2025

Ode to Randomness

Spectral dance, cosmic trance;

Every move choreographed,

Yet every move but chance.

Illusion, delusion, fantasy, dream;

You — just a random little shape,

In a random light beam.

This wisp so wistful, that wisp so chatty;

In one room spewing dreary grace,

In another, cranky, clawed and catty.

All things ephemera, all things a mystery;

Yet all these clever clever creatures,

Busy mending memory, busy inventing history.

Coercing meaning where there’s none;

The farcical, inane, ceaseless tedium,

Of stuffing a million stories into one.

Terrified of real sensations, terrified of truths;

Not daring to love absurdly, not daring to feel,

We sit there posing in our cosy little photo booths.

Pulling, pushing, smoothing, snipping,

Sculpting from the saggy and crinkled,

A form so shapely, satiny and gripping.

This moment so shabby, that one all dapper,

Swooning to sophisticated classical,

Then tapping to the blasphemous rapper.

They don’t mean what they say,

They don’t say what they mean,

Inferences are assumptions, words wet clay.

Proustian reveries, Joycean streams;

Colluding, colliding, coalescing, conspiring,

Realities weave thoughtlessly into dreams.

~*~