there is no final revolution
the people are turning,
nature is turning,
the world is turning
dark spirals
turning inward
the universe,
galaxies,
each particle
intrinsic —
direct experience
your iris —
the silent mirror,
reflecting me
experiencing you
direct, intrinsic
there is no final revolution
Postscript
The phrase “there is no final revolution” carries historical and philosophical resonance. Readers may recognize its atmosphere in Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We and in Zen’s longstanding caution toward final attainment. Those works approach revolution and awakening from different directions, yet both resist the idea of culmination as completion. The poem draws from that shared orientation without attempting commentary. It treats revolution as structure rather than event.
Turning is intrinsic to experience. Wherever something turns, something does not turn. The boundary between turning and not-turning appears as form, and form is the means by which anything becomes available at all. The widening scale—people, nature, world, universe, galaxies, each particle—traces participation rather than escalation. The closing movement contracts cosmology into immediacy: “experiencing you / direct, intrinsic.” The phrase permits multiple readings at once. Experience arises at the interface itself. The return to the opening line is therefore structural restatement. In this sense the poem leans toward Spinoza’s extension—not as doctrine, but as orientation. The revolution is not an event within time. It is the condition through which time and form are continuously given.
Image Credit
“Artist’s impression of the Milky Way.” Credit: ESO/NASA/JPL-Caltech/M. Kornmesser/R. Hurt.
Licensed under CC BY 4.0. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
Primitive Joe 
