as when you might read

some adventure story for the sake of the plot
or watch telly because there’s nothing else to do
and you know that consciousness becomes flat
like a bottle of lemonade left open for a day

but oh the hissing champagne-quality
of consciousness when you are excited
by ideas or moved by Beethoven—then—just
then—there is the fizzing and over-bubbling

of pure potentiality: consciousness is
awakened potentiality which it would be nice
to be able to inaugurate for ourselves
with some electronic slide control attached to

the brain so that we could turn consciousness up
and down at will… feel it moving within our bones
in just the same way as we see everything changing
when we make things dance on the computer screen

************************************************

awareness

rises to the surface;
we go in search of it long before
it has reached the surface—

too early an interception
harnesses the eliminative
function of the mind;

the potential we possess
from being a fragment of Mind at Large
is funnelled through the reducing valve

of brain & nervous system
and what comes out the other end
is just a measly trickle

of consciousness—the sort
that focusses on football matches
and the current value of our shares…

let awareness rise right up to the surface
without the desperate lunge of interception
without writing a script for it yet