Aiming, reaching, calling -- lost for hope and grieving,
weeping buttermilk butterflies weaving intricate paths
through dandelions and dandy lions.

I lost a piece of me that night, the night the slipper casually slipped off of my arched foot, softly falling away as though revealing a secret. Windows closed and opened, I breathed in cold air and stagnant air interchangeably.

Those tweed slacks, those worn and finger-pulled threads resting achingly forever on the chairback, as I awaited return of my brother who was lost at sea. Lost, but in some ways, found, as he escaped the drudgery of life that awaited him here. Glimpsing into the sleeve, I could still see the golden dragonfly I'd sewn in before his departure.

Nothing awaits you or me here, in this delicate moment of dark waiting. This chance seeks existence.

I hoped to become a believer, and I believed I would catch a glimpse this time, of some sort of cold, raw wintry scene. Descending into deep caverns inside my soul, I waited patiently.

Drought, emptiness, beauty. Such beauty.

I longed to touch you. I am waiting here, high on my self-created loveliness, pines dusting the brown carpet. When summer arrives, it will be a different scene. Feathers floating in some geometrically perfect spiral, catching iridescent angles in the last rays of sunlight before sunset.

These words can be documented as such. Meaningless shrapnel, adjusted commissaries. Tuning into the divine radio of thought patterns, like finding a complex piece of code hidden in machines. Provoking, provocatively. Spelling out sheer turmeric and penciling in calendars with a special fervor.

The feeling bloomed up -- quite literally, bloomed -- inside of me like a night-blooming cactus flower, and spilled out from my eyes as tantalizing light essence, traveled through the air, thick with swarming molecules, and hit you directly in the iris.

You were unprotected, vulnerable to my gaze, and visibly recoiled before succumbing to its honey-sweetness and shrinking into the pool of melodic experience. Having hunted for a feeling just moments before, I knew intuitively that the damage was irreversible, and cosmic webs spun you up rapidly. There it was --  a successful seizure by sight.

An embryo of desire -- they'd always warned me of detachment, and yet here I defiantly stood, elastic with desire, feeding the frenzy of alarms and nosediving singularly through a dream-like substance, known to the beings as space. Air and fire, astringent and procedural, organizing lifetimes of ambivalence, sprouting up from the River Ganges, defying our greatest expectations. What a gift, they screamed, laughs spilling and splashing, reverberating over the water's surface, culminating in a fiery energy that shook the earth I walked on.

Beatrice -- she stood there with her mouth open, drinking lazily the energy of the laughing souls. Happily fed, she returned to her place in the small crook of the great oak tree, playing coyly with her silver coils.

I painted green landscapes with my thumb, dropping crumbs from my mouth to form great mountains and breathing hot flames for movement. Smearing some blue into my unfinished painting, I caught the eye of a spoiled farmer who I'd often seen at cliff edges. He was waiting, but neither of us spoke.

Interrupted and no longer able to work, I bit off a handful of weeds from the earth and delivered it to the survivor, who held up his hands as he saw me approaching. I took his hands in my own and curled his fingers around the grass.

When he opened his fists, I had disappeared back to my spot near the river, and what glittered in his hands was a precious stone with which he could do whatever he liked.

An end to the misery, and end to the work. Oh delicate creatures, your worlds so pure and so stained.