This and That (The Piping of Earth)

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Adding, swelling
More in one spot
Growing, staying
Pretty much the same
Slowly, quicker
Helps if it's hot

At once--release!
In pieces small enough to have no name

Hurry, arms outstretched
Carry seeds of gold on uplifting fingers
Don't delay--to the weightless depths!
Peek with wonder
Fertile currents allow spring again!
You can know if you don't understand

Choosing, changing
Switching order
Sculpting, fleshing
Accidents become the laws
Encircling meaning
With a porous border

A shape is born!
The product falsely clarifies the cause

Hurry, arms outstretched
Carry seeds of gold on uplifting fingers
Don't delay--to the weightless depths!
Peek with wonder
Fertile currents allow spring again!
You can know if you don't understand

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This poem is about a dream I had--it was one of those dreams with very little action, but a whole lot of implicit meaning and impressionistic understanding.  I was facing a giant aquarium that was lit from the inside, full of tiny microorganisms floating around.  In the dream I remember feeling it was imperative that I get to the aquarium with what I was holding in my hands (which I knew was the beginning of a new life) so it could grow in the hot, fertile waters--and I wasn't the only one there ferrying life to the waters.

I spend a lot of In Not-Even-Anything Land trashing on our unqualified glorification of life (Hiding from Heaven and Dedicated... in particular), but this song celebrates the utterly inexplicable, microscopic transmutation that occurs when inanimate material becomes life.  Although I think we humans prize life as the ultimate good without giving much thought to the greater picture of the other amazing things going on in the universe, the beginning of life is a pretty amazing thing...just not necessarily better than something else. 

Among other things, the music experiments with ambiguous time signatures (for life's seeming randomness) and also with the guitar's timbre--I used a fine brush to play a hotly-miked guitar on the chorus to try and get ahold of the mysterious feeling the dream gave me.