The Beautiful Machine

By Jamie Smith
Salmon Arm, BC

Is this from my childhood?
the patch of sunlight on the living room carpet I used to play in?
The stars of dust in the beam of light
Their spiralling slow ascent

A story that comes from ourselves an archetype a journey that we invent as we go unconsciously the threads drawn outwards from the totality of our mind creating focussed detail and ingenuity on the surface of which we are always moving towards some clear objective that evolves as we gain talismanic indicators of direction and purpose and increase in strength in an arc towards the final obstacle which cannot evade our victory

Echoes of a garden
Green, filled with rain
Soft warm Spring
Somewhere
I can’t remember
An early memory
Defined as a metaphor for me which persists
in code

Everything in the beautiful machine is created to the limits of experience in the instant that we are experiencing it. A simulation. The mechanics of the code and its limitations are not known but it is more than metaphor at once simultaneously true and false. It is the beautiful machine.

A Spiral staircase
That widens as we climb
Into the branches
Of a tree that holds the stars

The centre of the spiral staircase is the circle of the sky you look up into as you lean against the railing to try to see how far you have to go and it is the dark circle you can hardly bear to look down into below you

The centre of the spiral staircase is a cylinder of absence.

The centre of the spiral staircase is the still point in this spinning world

The Beautiful Machine
Copyright © Jamie Smith, 2020