A View From Within

What does it feel like to be a mind?
A mind alive behind the eyes,
seeing within the darkness.

The senses enter like waves:
fragrance, sound, light, pressure,
breaking upon an inward shore
alive with color and meaning.

Thought gathers beneath the surface,
rising in a cognitive mist,
illuminating hidden scenery
before breaking into form.

Images kindle images.
Words glimmer at the edges.
Memory opens translucent chambers,
layer beyond layer of imagination,
ebbing, flowing, vanishing,
leaving faint traces on the shore.

Ideas rise first as impressions,
brief illuminations
crossing the mental landscape,
threading webs of consciousness
into lattices of meaning.

Some thoughts arrive as reason,
stone laid carefully upon stone.
Others flash through hidden corridors;
intuition’s white fire,
knowing before it knows why.

And beneath them all drift
gossamer traces of mentation:

Half-formed faces,
unspoken sentences,
echoes answering echoes,
a thousand small beginnings
vanishing before they are seen.

Under the thinning fog,
the surf curls and creams
almost without sound,
thought trying to form itself
at the edge of consciousness.

Then the mind turns inward
upon its own quiet rumination.
The watcher notices the watching.
The fire becomes aware of the flame.
And from somewhere within
the hidden theater of being
comes thought reflecting upon itself:

What am I thinking?
And who is it that asks?