Faceted

FrankensteinsCyborg, "Acetylsalicylic acid," 2015

The world is too large and complicated for me
to attend it whole; all I can grasp are the small,
least significant facets. My arms and shoulders
ache: that’s one instance of what my attention
can encompass. A small dog is smiling, panting
from the heat of the day—that’s another. The
plumbago, blooming, may be more significant
than the other facets, having stolen bits of the
summer sky for bees. Or perhaps not. My bias
towards beauty leads me into errors of the von
Restorff kind, giving those beautiful things I see
primacy, foregrounding in memory—a trick of
the light, at play with the mind. But if a gem's
beauty begins with the path light takes through
its facets, no wonder I find, even in this cut and
ground-down world, beauty everywhere, light
spilling from every facet, every facet a prism to
parse the world into bright signals, breaking it
open through us, moving light to full spectrum.