☀ Today's Poem: Excerpt from "Faust" Sandeep Parmar

To strive, you think, to know. You’ve brought with you a copy of Faust. What is it to want to know everything. The light sharpens to a point to a full stop to an ingot of gold at 7.30 p.m. This alchemy. Do you open Faust. Do you leave it in the dingy room, on the beige bedspread, a wager of its own in our Eden this Arcadia. Faust’s strip of coastline, a paradise built in his dotage, unbegun but in his imagination, an inner light. Now you remember everything. You are in a state of sudden alertness. You find your aim you strive. There is the sun, blinding all the summer day. There is the cliff, where Euphorion dropped into blackness marching heroic. You think of the roses and how you carried them all in your arms. Striding full of hope into another century. To want, to owe, to feel shame. Dear sister. To wish to know everything Faust says you must become nothing Mephistopheles says to extend beyond what is human you must become the Spirit of Eternal Negation Faust says you must be willing to die but I am not afraid to die Mephistopheles says I will route your indentured soul from an eye an ear a navel a fingernail for the jaws of hell are always open Faust love has waded through my many dreams and orchestrations Mephistopheles opines we were all girls in another century baring our arms in an inhabited garden Care slips through the keyhole like smoke a kind of being without a kind of alchemy Faust you will never fall where love can be seen from a great height rising above these hills like a memorable star.