drag around ideas until
        they spring to life in blazing color;
           surf out on the stars until
        they yield their incandescent truth --

          sell your first desires to get
           a taste of what forever means;
         bring your plans and schedules to
        a place where time's for letting go

               and know the way,
              the night, the view,
         the empathy that makes you, you;
              and taste the edge,
              the edge of thought,
          a caravan ballet of splendor,
           spread across the universe
     in hues of contraindicated pleasures --

             spare the child and spoil
        the very rod of what it means to feel;
           glowing like an lantern, there
          the carbon filament you dragged

                  to lighting

We dreamed the summer into life,
And breathed the same life into love;
The tropics were our latitude,
A latitude we took all of –

We sampled of the dreamer’s herb,
And saw the dark with widened eyes:
A living summer, made of light,
And psychedelic
Butterflies

The new brings worlds previously unimagined
Which we can now experience

The old brings worlds unexperienced
Which we can now only imagine

I started old, from earliest memories
Spent visiting oldish houses with endless staircases
Somewhere in upstate New York

Houses with attics
And old books
By people with names like
Ethel M. Dell

And the sun itself
Seemed to enjoy landing on objects
More congenial to it’s age

In old wooden dwellings of aunts and uncles

Exploring a distant past

Whose very exploration

Grows every day more distant

The whispered earth is blood and bone
Beneath the ever-churning skies
That mourn our impassivity
These calls-to-action made of lies
For which we must give soon account
To shield the weak and grief atone
Yes us who crawl this cracking skin
Beneath which lays earth’s blood
And bone

the shadows sing, and interlace
within, around this grateful place;
compassion sits in angled dark,
in whispers soft and palate stark

instinctively, reflexively,
in actions spun by sophistry,
in tunic, or chemise, or sark -
the cloth we choose: our sign, our mark --

and still, despite our reticence,
those shadows - guilt and innocence -
will kiss and cross the floor, in light,
and evanesce like what is right

for we are trapped within our dreams
in forests brushed by mountain streams,
to triumph, or, to rue disgrace --
as shadows sing,
and interlace

when daylight sings
the song of many treasures,
then mem’ry breaks into
a hundred measures

of melody and harmony
in one –
of laughter, breathless;
buoyancy and fun –

and when we reach the end,
we hit repeat:
the sand, the sea,
the sunshine, and
the sweet

hectic, frantic, turbulent;
fervid and chaotic –

motions of the restless crowd,
rituals robotic

no one here but all of us,
senses override —

hassled and tumultuous,
swallowed by
the tide

the children asked where she had gone:
the day was cool and messaging –
she is out by the pines, i think,
for autumn has been presaging
a time, two times, and time again;
and woods and paths, they know a friend

the gathered friends seemed so concerned:
they drank their coffees, spasming –
she’s safe out by the pines, i’d guess,
she spends her days in chasming
from you, from me, and all alone;
but woods and paths, they know their own

our lives spin on in crisscross lines
that knot up here or there
out by the pines