The Naming of Species

Crossing over to the last bit of land,
The last inhabitable cluster before the pole.
Nothing north about this south.
Sun glaring on a featureless terrain,
Once lit by fires, huddled around by the fat greased eaters
of mussels and little else.
- The most primitive he´d ever seen - said Darwin.
The only able to survive down here too.
- More like animals than humans - he continues.
Unable to make such distinctions?
Maybe Darwin was right.
In the distance, the limit of vision,
Dark forms shiver out of the haze,
Arrousing suspicions in the mind´s gaze.
Causing the pupils to enlarge,
A chain reaction.
What giants hover in the mirage?

Clouds that have curdled in Fuegian skies turn petrol streak colours around the sun.
I develop an enraptured neck ache.
Seeing in impossible detail, I wonder, how much of these floating fjords have I imagined?
How much retina? How much mentality retiscent to leave it at that?
A mind desperate to recognise: stitch truth in lies; put name to form.
- Oh yes, its one of those! - A categorical relief.
Keeping moments of mystery brief.
Why such satisfaction, such mental peace?
In fixing forms in allegories. Substitutions.
For things felt and remembered.
The metaphysical, metamorphical, immeasurable mescallany of that self same mind.
Is it nature or culture? That needs certainty for security.
To navigate by join the dots,
By constellations of associations in a universe of words.
Strewn like litter from a car window,
The packages of every thought, sight and sensation consumed,
Utilities picked up, put down and resumed.
Uniting and dividing,
Through lines drawn across maps.
And between we call it and what it is.
Putting things in boxes to build a world:
Cathedrals and public toilets, factories and gardens,
Anything you like as long as its not already something.
Divide and conquer - thats the rule. Divide and shackle.
Create a meaning from a mistrust of plurality,
Undoubtedly real but not the same as reality.
A picture kills a thousand words,
A sound or sculpture a thousand more.
A phrase is a vulture, a paragraph a whore,
Picking over the carcass of intuition, and renting out ribs
to brandish in a war of understanding.
Solemnly, we play our parts in the pantomime.
Driven by love and compulsion,
Warped by greed and revulsion,
At difference and the unnameable, uncontainable, shameful instinct,
So difficult to shake.
"Prejudice: roundly condemned and wholly upheld - part of being a human"
The dictionary doesn´t read,
"Part of an intransient need, to know what is from what is not."
A flawed system but the best we´ve got.