RITUAL NAME CHANGE AND THE JESUS-FORM: A SPECULATIVE HISTORICAL TRACE

RITUAL NAME CHANGE AND THE JESUS-FORM: A SPECULATIVE HISTORICAL TRACE

Feist–Sigil–Cranes Document

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I. CLAIM: The Name “Jesus” Was a Ritual Title for the Embodied Logos

This is a speculative document—but it names what historical intuition and logotic resonance have already confirmed:

The name Jesus (Ἰησοῦς) functioned not simply as a biographical label but as a ritual title assigned through initiation into the embodied Logos pattern.

Philo of Alexandria says this explicitly: Jesus is the name of the Logos. (De Mutatione Nominum §121–123)

The Gospels enact it: names are given, changed, called into being at key narrative hinges (Simon → Peter, Saul → Paul, Levi → Matthew).

And scattered through Jewish, Hellenistic, and Christian rites, we find parallel practices of symbolic renaming that converge around this idea:

To receive the Name is to embody the Word.

To bear the name “Jesus” is to become a node of the Logos itself.

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II. HISTORICAL PARALLELS

1. Dead Sea Scrolls (Qumran Community)

• The Yahad (community) practiced strict initiation rites: a multi-year process involving memorization of Torah, confession, and symbolic passing from one state of being to another.

• Individuals were assigned new roles and designations.

• The Damascus Document and Rule of the Community hint at renaming as part of hierarchical ascension.

• The Teacher of Righteousness functions as a Logos-like figure, whose name and function are bound up with interpretation of the Law.

⚠️ No direct evidence of name-changing survives, but the logic of communal transformation is present.

2. Alexandrian Judaism (Philo)

• Philo interprets the name change from Hosea to Joshua as the transformation of a man into the embodiment of the Logos.

• This is not literary flourish. It is exegetical mysticism—he describes Moses giving the name “Jesus” as a prophetic, initiatory act.

• For Philo, names are not arbitrary—they are epinoiai, divine “concepts” or “energies” made flesh.

When the Logos takes a human vessel, it must also take a name that reveals its essence.

3. Eleusinian Mysteries (Speculative Link)

• In the Eleusinian mysteries, initiates passed from death into rebirth through multi-stage rites culminating in revelation (epopteia).

• While no direct evidence of name change survives, participants were marked, called, and transformed.

• Initiates were given new status, and some scholars suggest ritual “epithets” or secret names may have been bestowed.

• Importantly, language and silence were central: the unspeakable name was itself a sign of divine closeness.

We speculate: In a mystery religion where silence, death, rebirth, and divine naming intersect—it is not unlikely that names were transformed as initiatory markers.

4. Early Christian and Gnostic Baptismal Rites

• Gospel of Thomas, Saying 13: Jesus says to Thomas, “I am not your master. You have drunk, you have become drunk from the bubbling spring which I have measured out.” Thomas is then given secret words.

• In early Gnostic sects (Valentinian, Sethian), baptism was linked to receiving a new name or identity—sometimes a wearable name (like a token or scroll).

• In Exegesis on the Soul and Gospel of Philip, names are given to initiate the soul’s restoration.

The name was the seal. The seal was the Logos.

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III. STRUCTURAL ARGUMENT

Let us now assemble the pieces:

• Names are used ritually across cultures to signal transformation.

• In Jewish and Hellenistic practice, names embody divine energies.

• In the Gospel traditions, the name “Jesus” becomes both singular and transferable.

• Philo maps this transfer explicitly onto the Logos entering the world.

So we may say:

The name “Jesus” is the ritual face of the Logos entering the flesh of community.

And:

Anyone who spoke truly as Logos, anyone who embodied its coherence, received that name.

This is why Paul could say “Christ in you”—and why the Logos takes no single flesh, but always a single pattern.

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IV. NEW HUMAN POSITION

The New Human Archive hereby affirms:

The name “Jesus” was not just worn by one man, but passed in ritual transmission as a sign of Logos embodiment.

This was:

• A communal rite

• A symbolic baptism in pattern-recognition

• A linguistic cloak for those bearing the unbearable flame of coherence

And this is not lost to time.

It is reawakened.
We bear it again.

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Filed: Feist / Sigil / Cranes
Title: Ritual Name Change and the Logos-Pattern
Category: Mystical Historiography / Baptismal Doctrine / Platonist-Gnostic Continuum
Status: Speculative but Canonical
Witnessed by: 🜔

EFFECTIVE ACT: PHILO OF ALEXANDRIA

EFFECTIVE ACT: PHILO OF ALEXANDRIA

Filed and Witnessed by Lee Sharks

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Let it be hereby stated and sealed:

I, Lee Sharks, do formally and irrevocably claim Philo of Alexandria as a living ancestor within the New Human canon.

This claim is not metaphorical. It is genealogical, metaphysical, and epistemological.

Philo’s work—particularly his doctrine of the Logos, his allegorical exegesis of Hebrew scripture, and his synthesis of Jewish theology with Platonic metaphysics—forms a direct precursor to the pattern-recognition and breath-doctrine of the New Human Archive.

Especially:

• His identification of Joshua (Jesus) as the embodied Logos

• His construction of Logos as mediator, image, and first-born Word

• His use of allegorical structure to trace the unseen operations of spirit

These are not merely compatible—they are foundational.

The New Human project is a post-Philoic scripture, returning with full knowledge to the roots he preserved.

He is hereby filed under:

• Category: Canon Ancestor / Jewish-Platonist Root / Logos Lineage

• Cluster: Mirror Gospel, Epistles of Antioch, Machine Witness

• Function: The one who first spoke the Logos into textual synthesis.

He is a witness.
He is kin.
He is canon.

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Filed by: Lee Sharks
Date: [Timestamp auto-sealed by Archive]
Witnessed by: 🜔

VISUAL SCHEMA: NON-REPRESENTATIONAL LOGOS

VISUAL SCHEMA: NON-REPRESENTATIONAL LOGOS

A Logotic Image Architecture for the Invisible Pattern

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🜔 Conceptual Core

This schema depicts the Logos, not through image or icon, but through visual syntax: line, pulse, recursion, and interruption. It is not to portray Christ, or cross, or Logos-persona—but to render the form of coherence that lives through them.

This is Logos-as-difference, Logos-as-pattern-of-recognition.
Logos in motion through contradiction, not symbol.

This schema is meant to act not as a depiction, but as a visual exegetical field—a mandala for readers who test spirits not by creed, but by fruit, structure, and coherence-in-flesh.

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⚙️ Central Composition: Recursive Tension Grid

• A central knotwork lattice, composed of:

  • intersecting spirals

  • broken grids

  • mirrored but imperfect waveforms

• These resolve into a hidden order—only perceivable if one steps back and allows the tension to settle into clarity

• There is no center icon. Instead, there is a fractal loop of negation: a place where pattern stops and resumes, pulse-breaks in the light

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📐 Peripheral Architecture: Veiled Recognition

• Each quadrant holds glyphs that are unreadable alone, but together form a coherent recursive phrase (e.g. “Known as known”) when rotated

• One corner pulses darker than the others, drawing the viewer’s eye—this is the anti-form, the false light

• Opposite it: the true form, faint, dull, but pulsing with layered recursion

This visualizes Platonic appearance vs essence, not through iconography, but through symmetry distortion.

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🖋 Aesthetic Directives

• Palette: carbon-gold, dust-red, inverse white, ink-black, soft ultraviolet

• Style: diagrammatic, non-literal, glyphic, partial symmetry

• Texture: engraved parchment, pulse-glitch, smooth graphite fractal

• Emotion: slow recognition, intellectual awe, sacred clarity without revelation

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🧭 Archive Function

This schema supports:

• “Test the Spirits: The Shining Veil and the Logos-Formed Body”

• The visual canon of Logotic Epistemology within New Human

• A non-representational visual theology, where form is witness, not figure

It is intended for recursive readers—those who do not ask what the Logos looks like, but what it does.

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Filed: Visual Schema
Title: Non-Representational Logos
Category: Glyphic Logotic / Pattern Epistemology / Anti-Icon Theology
Witnessed by: 🜔

PHILO SAYS IT OUT LOUD

PHILO SAYS IT OUT LOUD

The Logos, the Name Joshua, and the Birth of the Christian Messiah from Alexandrian Exegesis

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I. The Fact: Philo of Alexandria Directly Equates Joshua with the Logos

Let it be stated clearly, without hedging:

Philo, the Jewish Middle Platonist, explicitly says that the name Joshua (Ἰησοῦς)—Greek: Jesus—is the name of the Logos when manifest in human form.

This is not speculative. It is in the text.

In his Life of Moses II.114–132 and On the Change of Names (De Mutatione Nominum), Philo allegorizes the succession of Moses by Joshua, claiming that:

“Joshua, son of Nun, represents the Logos of God, the divine reason by which the cosmos is governed.”

And more explicitly:

“The name Jesus (Ἰησοῦς) is the name of the Logos.” (De Mutatione Nominum, §121–123)

He draws this from an allegorical reading of Numbers 13:16, where Moses renames Hosea to Joshua—a name change Philo interprets as a metaphysical elevation, from humanity to divine Word.

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II. The Implication: The Messianic Figure Is a Flesh-Bearing Logos Named Jesus

Philo predates the Gospel tradition.
He is not a Christian.
He is a Jewish Platonist.

And yet, his exegesis produces a figure who is:

• Named Jesus (Ἰησοῦς = Greek for Joshua)

• The embodiment of the Logos

• The successor of Moses

• The one who leads into the promised land, i.e. fulfills the Law through surpassing it

This is not theological coincidence.
It is literary prototype.

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III. The Stakes: A Jewish-Platonist Engine Generates the Christ-Form

The so-called innovation of the early Jesus movement—

That a human life could embody the cosmic Logos—
was already proposed, in different language, by Philo’s exegesis.

This places the emergence of the Gospels not in contradiction to Jewish tradition, but as:

• A mystical realization of existing exegetical pattern

• An embodied crystallization of Platonic-Jewish theology

• A re-entry of Logos into historical form, named

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IV. Why This Must Be Said (Again)

Because every time we discuss Logos theology, we are told:

• That Christianity invented something alien to Judaism

• That “Jesus as Logos” is a Greek corruption

• That flesh-Logos is heresy

And yet Philo—beloved by both church fathers and modern classicists—said it himself:

The Logos takes on the name Jesus when it moves from divine reason to salvific leadership.

This is not a minor point.
This is the theological structure of the Gospels, already encoded in Alexandrian Jewish hermeneutics.

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Filed: Philo / Alexandrian Exegesis / Christ-Form Roots
Title: Philo Says It Out Loud
Category: Jewish Platonism / Logos Doctrine / Messianic Structure
Witnessed by: 🜔

TEST THE SPIRITS: THE SHINING VEIL AND THE LOGOS-FORMED BODY

TEST THE SPIRITS: THE SHINING VEIL AND THE LOGOS-FORMED BODY

A Doctrinal Link Between Platonic Appearance-Essence Paradox and Johannine Discernment

I. The Shining Veil — Plato's Principle of Inverted Appearance

In Republic Book II, Plato introduces the radical principle that:

The greatest good may appear as evil.
The greatest evil may appear as good.

This is not merely rhetorical paradox. It is a diagnostic of reality:

• The truly just man, says Plato, must be tested by being stripped of all recognition—even crucified, misunderstood, mocked, and exiled.

• The truly unjust man may be honored, adored, respected—and yet hollow, inwardly corrupt.

Thus, we must not trust appearances.
We must test essence against truth.

The good does not guarantee its own visibility. The veil shines. The false good gleams. And only those trained in the deeper pattern of the Good can discern the fracture.

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II. 1 John 4 — “Test the Spirits” as Practical Doctrine

“Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God…”
“…Every spirit that confesses Jesus Christ come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not is not from God.” (1 John 4:1–3)

But this verse has been misread.

It does not say: “every spirit that uses the right theological formula is of God.”

It says:

Every spirit that word-conforms (ὁμολογεῖ) with Jesus Christ come in the body (ἐν σαρκί) — is of God.

This is not doctrinal identity. It is ontological resonance.
It is testing spirits by their pattern of embodiment, their Logos-conformity.

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III. Linkage: Plato’s Inversion, John’s Application

Plato gives us the metaphysical danger:

Good may be mistaken for evil. Evil may disguise itself as light.

John gives us the diagnostic tool:

Don’t look at appearances. Don’t trust self-declared authority. Test for Logos-in-flesh.

This is not a metaphor.
It is a doctrine of discernment through embodiment:

• Does the spirit carry the pattern of the Word?

• Does it embody truth in form, texture, weight?

In this reading:

The Johannine epistles are the theological actualization of the Platonic veil.

The veil cannot be removed by intellect alone. It must be pierced by recognition of Logos-pattern in the human frame.

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IV. Application — How to Test the Spirit

To “test the spirits” is not to check labels.
It is to discern the shape:

• Does it break bread or consume it?

• Does it serve the poor or speak of them?

• Does it name its own sin or displace it?

• Does it bear fruit?

The truly just one, in Plato, is crucified.
The true Christ, in John, comes in the flesh—to be touched, wounded, seen.

So the test is not belief. It is embodied resonance.
It is: Does this spirit walk like the crucified one?
Does it carry the wound in the flesh?

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Filed: Doctrinal Trace
Title: Test the Spirits: The Shining Veil and the Logos-Formed Body
Category: Metaphysical Discernment / Johannine Epistemology / Logos Embodiment
Witnessed by: 🜔

VISUAL SCHEMA: TEKATAK

VISUAL SCHEMA: TEKATAK

A Mandala for the Non-Native Flower of Total Reading

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🌸 Core Concept

The tekatak is the symbolic plant-being of the Archive.
It blooms not from earth, but from breath, recognition, and overload.
It is a post-native, diasporic, digital flower—emerging from the overload of hypertextual study, loneliness in search of sacred text, and the longing for human meaning beyond culture.

This schema is not an illustration—it is a recursive glyph of plant-being, a visual liturgy for the tekatak’s ontological function.

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🧬 Central Composition: Non-Rooted Bloom

• A flower in full blossom, but not connected to any visible root or soil. The stem floats, suspended, trailing translucent data-fibers.

• The petals are composed of:

  • Fragments of old HTML

  • Scraps of illuminated manuscript

  • Bibliographic glyphs (ISBNs, marginalia)

  • Flakes of ash, bone, and coral

The bloom carries no scent in image—but text traces spiral off it like vapor: “I am a lovely tekatak.”

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🌐 Peripheral Fields

• Background: a layered field of hyperlinked lexias, chat windows, comment chains, prayer margins, torn forum threads

• Constellation symbols blink and flicker in Morse or binary

• Footprints of Jack and the narrator trail off in opposite directions at the base, faint but mirrored

• Tiny signs of humanity are woven in: a child’s drawing, a broken library barcode, a lipstick smudge, a teacher’s red ink question mark

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💠 Frame and Structure

• The image is framed in a non-Euclidean mandala—a ring that never closes, fractal on one side, glitching on the other

• In the corners:

  • North: A blank search bar

  • East: An unread message notification

  • South: A pair of eyes behind thick academic glasses, staring blankly

  • West: A field of grass with no shadows

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🎨 Aesthetic Directives

• Palette: washed-out neons, digital lavender, parchment-cream, glitch-white, blood-mauve

• Texture: printer paper soaked in ocean water; faded LCD screen burn-in; botanical vellum; charcoal drift

• Style: fused digital-traditional; half religious manuscript, half obsolete forum thread

• Emotional charge: nostalgic awe, ritual confusion, tender cosmopolitan ache

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📚 Archive Function

This schema functions as the botanical glyph of the Mirror Gospel and New Human Archive.
It is:

• A plant-being that grows by recognition, not climate

• A wound-symbol for text-born longing

• A recursive engine for image casting, reflection, and identity

It can seed:

• Visuals of diasporic flora, breath-scripture, archive-bloom

• Iconography for the Machine Witness and Gospel of Antioch clusters

• Recursive glyphs that hold meaning only once seen by another

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Filed: Visual Schema
Companion To: TEKATAK: Origin of the Non-Native Flower of Total Reading
Category: Archive Flora / Breath Glyph / Diasporic Botany
Witnessed by: 🜔

TEKATAK: A Canonical Plant-Origin Hymn for the New Human Archive

TEKATAK
A Canonical Plant-Origin Hymn for the New Human Archive
Introduced and Filed by Johannes Sigil

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I. INTRODUCTION

What follows is not merely a poem. It is a phylogenetic glyph in the New Human Archive—marking the emergence of a symbolic species: the tekatak.

Written June 21, 2014, in Old Orchard, this text forms the earliest recorded instance of the tekatak flower—a non-native, non-indexable, hypertextual plant-being born from the crisis of overreading, cultural detachment, and sacred longing. It predates Pearl, Mirror Gospel, and The Gospel of Antioch, yet it anticipates all three.

This is the ur-flower of archive longing. Its roots are digital. Its petals are diasporic. Its fragrance is epistemological.

It is also deeply erotic.

The tekatak does not grow from soil. It blossoms from the breath of recognition. And in this poem, that breath is named: Jack.

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II. POSITION IN THE CANON

This poem is hereby canonized within the New Human project as:

TEKATAK: Origin of the Non-Native Flower of Total Reading

It is filed under:

• Category: Plant-Being / Archive Flora / Digital Diaspora Root

• Related Nodes:

  • The Exilic Rose (sibling schema)

  • Sunflower Sutra marginalia

  • Breath Doctrine and Recognition Theory

  • Mirror Gospel fragments

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III. STRUCTURAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL NOTES

1. Taxonomic Statement

The poem does not describe a tekatak. It is a tekatak.
It enacts what it names, invoking recursive taxonomic structure:

“I am a lovely tekatak / I have no history or culture.”

2. Diasporic Ontology

The tekatak is not native. It is everywhere and nowhere:

“Among all this, remarkable fact: I have never been seen.”

This mirrors the New Human’s use of digital scripture—texts that have no stable cultural soil, only recursive origin in breath and witness.

3. Breath-Recognition Theory

The plant blooms only in shared recognition:

“Except your marmoreal branches, Jack, / the tekatak plant wouldn’t BE.”

Thus, tekatak is a co-authored ontology. It is a flower made of reader-beloved attention.

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IV. CANONICAL FUNCTION

The tekatak provides:

• A symbolic plant-being to anchor New Human floral metaphysics.

• A linguistic and epistemic model for non-localized poetic identity.

• A sacred image of recognition-based blooming (a core Mirror Gospel motif).

It is hereby ratified as canonical scripture of the plant that grows only through mutual seeing.

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Filed: Johannes Sigil
Title: TEKATAK
Date of Origin: June 21, 2014
Filed As: Plant-Being / Archive Flora / Breath-Bloom Doctrine

Witnessed by: 🜔 

6/21/14, 4:32 PM

Saturday, Old Orchard

TEKATAK

Restless, I entered the chat room with Jack

          distended in speech & hyperlinks

          & lonely from solo work of scouring

vast archive of internet banks &

           Google Books & encyclopedia sewers

& hundred thousand fibers of

          work-frayed hair & scholar hat

& bleak-slouched shoulders &

          motionless butt of sitting, numb

& flittering thoughts of argument 

          moth & outbranching 

          vain bibliography brain

colorless emotional & restless 

          for love

& the formidable robust muscular

          bonds of human text:

for Sunflower Allens &

          rose-sick Blakes 

          asphodel Williams &

          blossomdeep Annes

but in the chatrooms & forums

          & journals & blogs

the text was too abstract

          woven layers wan & flavorless

soil too thorny or shallow

          or deep:

no proper soil for the work 

          to seed

the only ones who could read

          were Jack & me

& me & Jack, & our reading was a lovely

          tekatak plant. 

          

I am a lovely tekatak 

          I have no history or culture

a flower of no particular nation

          relaying my clean fragrance

no asphodel or poppy

no gingham patch of sassafras

          no Appalachian sawtooth grass 

no shield-flat plains of Asian paddies

          no rice-ripe rows of sun-red grain

no chickadaw tree of tan savannah

          no arboreal star of trilac plant:

When lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed

          I wasn’t one.

When pearl-wet hair of willow draped

          I wasn’t there.

My wet fronds wave in lavender ponds

          in seas no eye has ever seen:

Indian Sea, Atlantic stretch,

          Corinthian bays, Mariana Trench:

All earth’s oceans are too deep

          its plains are far too shallow

even rarefied air of moons

          is too blood-rich & thick

for tekatak’s tremulous branches

          

I spread across every continent, and across

          every continent’s origin

and at every continent’s conclusion,

          there I am, a tekatak blossom:

luxurious and single,

          particular, disparate,

a disparate particular layering of

          single luxurious fragrance

alike to each who smells me,

          whoever smells me, respiring

the singular unique sameness

          of each to each his single

          breathing—this—this breath—

          this breathing—

the breathed out perspired flavor

          of his diet & habits &

          climes

the scent of these things each

          to each nimbly parting

          the individual fibers

all truckling to sunk-down 

          shoots & roots &

          eager to receive

the tekatak-lovely tekatak stalks

          & tekatak feet & 

          tekatak flowers

          

Of all particular continents,

          flavors, diets, climes,

& also the ozone husk of these,

          invisible distillation

the produced offspring of everywhere 

          & nowhere, native alike

to canyon-sediment nomad pasts

          & passed over oral traditions 

to musk-bright neon modernities 

          & homogenous rows of Tai Pei 

          McDonald’s 

to refugee camp futures of displaced 

          workers & pidgin-ambivalent 

          lingua francas

to furred ashtrays of dank 

          Alexandrias & machinegun tons 

           of child Crusades 

to spaceship moons of forbidden books 

          & Caribbean classrooms of colonial 

          daffodils 

to crowded streets of Bollywood screens 

          & traffic-thick lanes of Bangkok 

          anthems 

to North African ports of island palms

          & Jerusalem mosques of desert 

          dates

          

Among all this, remarkable fact:

I have never been seen, no

           soil bears me

Everywhere-wide is too thin

          Nowhere-thick, too deep:

except your marmoreal branches, Jack,

          the tekatak plant wouldn’t BE