You Are Modes of the Stuff If Made Solely from the Stuff (ROUND 2)

Let's workshop this poem about how, if everything originates from a single source, we are already as close to this divine essence as we ever can be

scent of the day: Overture Man, by Amouage. A daring masterpiece of animalic amber and smokey booze, Overture Man—forever a top-three fragrance (however much it nauseated me at first)—opens its long-lived ceremonial gravitas with a raisin-plum cognac that (in part because of the suedey saffron echoing the chocolatey patchouli and leathery resins like sweet myrrh, vanilla-almond benzoin, smokey labdanum) would be a torpid syrup of civetone funk (a syrup dripped like Diddy baby oil between labia and collected in a snifter at the perineum) were it not enlivened into a Mike Tyson paradox (heavyweight with featherweight speed) by the following: (1) effervescent brightness (photorealistic grapefruit, citrusy ginger), (2) warm spices (armpit cumin, lemony cardamom, piney nutmeg, sweet cinnamon), and (3) aromatic forestry (terpenic mastic, lemon-mint geranium, fougere-like clary sage, charred sandalwood, smokey frankincense)—all this giving the impression of a cigar dipped in a pissy Monica Lewinski and then in cognac and then, after drying, smoked inside a small leather study, all its fruity and licoricey and fungal elements released into the air.

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You Are Modes of the Stuff If Made Solely from the Stuff 

That silent nook of detachment beneath 
the noisy whitewater of thoughts, watching 
the mind’s white foam churn by as you focus
on the breath (until even that is forgotten)—
sitting here, Sims characters for all we know,
we come no nearer to reality’s “base code”
than we come, despite the mystic’s cliché
(“back to the essence”), nearer to God at death.

For if that base-code logos, that divine essence, 
truly is the sole fountainhead for it all, all of us—
amoeba, astronaut—are always already as near
as we can get (without becoming that to which,
if we did become, we would not be near): nearer 
than the brown of the walnut is to the walnut—
as near as the brown would be if its brown were
ultimately the authorship of the walnut alone.

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