Mother pulled the beat to hell diluted blood red minivan containing my brother and I into the darkened parking lot. The car couldn't park fast enough as my brother and I tore the creaky side door open and leapt onto the awaiting pavement. We stepped from darkness into light as we hopped onto a curb to be greeted by the brilliance of neon lights erected atop a single story rectangular building squatting at the top of the rectangular lot like a full measure rest. Glass windows as whole walls teased the treasures that lay before my eyes window-shopping like madmen I felt the objects of my covetry leap from their white shelves into my sweaty youthful grasp. Mother breezed forward, stepping across the tier confidant and disengaged; the front door rang announcing our presence. Two bells sounded: ring ring. The Rhines were here. Like a pistol shot signifying the start of a race, my brother and I scampered and scattered and scuttled like wild animals, scouring the shelves that sat dispersed through the gleaming room consuming with our eyes words that told stories with pictures that danced and sang. Clusters of shelves huddled together under several flat signs hung by frail strings dangling from the ceiling displaying themes that told me where to avoid "Romance" and where to find my beloved "Science Fiction." I halted, realizing almost as if there were indentations within the itchy carpet that had alerted me to the place where I had cemented by ruddy feet countless times before. I took my roving eyes from the stalling ground to peer up into the shelves that loomed over me like giants, arching over my head like holy stones erected atop holy celebratory sites of yore. My fingers traced along the shelves trailing over the innumerate plastic spines that encased my bountiful riches; I mouthed the vibrant words imprinted like cattle on each of them and sang to myself stories that spawned off of each one before finding the paragon that most expertly weaved JR the Raconteur into its fabrications. I bore into its dazzling shell hungrily, gobbling up faces and places and names and dates I spun it over to its backside to read plots to read histories to read legacies to read memories I read and read and saw and saw my mind was never more alive with the astounding conception of limitless potentialities my night was just getting started and with my final selection--and mother's blessing--I would march home victoriously wielding my fortune, my medium for which the pictures in my mind would transpose and dance before me like luminous sprites on the brilliant splendor of a luminescent two dimensional stage that is the television screen. It was the weekend getaway I waited for with anticipation every Saturday; I was an unversed monk relishing in the ancient libraries of History.

I'm the forlorn cigarette
you once placed so fervently
between soft lips;

Now I lay cast between
the cracks of the sidewalks sidewalks sidewalks.

Anticipating a

Slow Death; growing claustrophobic--
ensconced in my callous/caustic confines.

Trampled into the concrete crevice by
hastened footsteps;

My desolation denotes the sad dictum
that is my denigration.  

A slow digestion of a stubborn body
created like the concrete to be trodden by wandering soles
stamping out their fleeting existence.

Dissolute, wishing to burn;  
I long for your taste again.

Is a man
who acquiesces to love's embrace
ever sinless? (never a lamb)
always libidinous? (perpetually the wolf)  

I pondered this (stigmatic) question
as I entered the densely-wooded trail,
to seek my analogous answers
in the enchanting mystery of the naked forest--

Much as I had before,
seeking truth and solace in love's embrace;
tucked within her ample *****,
where I had once lain my head
gently flowing with the rise and fall
of her chest--

much like the advances and retreats
of aching waves on the beleaguered shore.

I traveled the woods, taking it all in--
as I, the woods,
and the woods, my love,
and the earth, my foundation,
and the sky:
My god.

I heard avian sprites dance in the thickets and brush,
scampering away from my intrusions.

These birds; be they so timid in my presence?
Or, in their sprite-like visage,
do they simply mirror such intrinsically motivated ambulations;
their impalpable purposes impervious to Man's prodding.  

I feel I seek their fleeting company in my mind's eye,
who wanders incessantly in its dreadful musings,
while my earthly senses
merely soak in what is to be seen.

And I see the naked overturned tree--
victim of the vitriolic hurricane's rages;
who lies ashamed before my queried glances,
silently panning from empty branches
protruding from a battered trunk,
down to her meandering roots--
who look meaningless in their desperate search
for earthly riches.

I almost feel guilty enough to cast my eyes from her sight--
and she is left to only rot in the foliage
that once entertained her life;

and her in turn having once contributed
to the beauty
I precede,

in the impending vernal equinox
alluded by the returning chansonettes
of those dainty birds--
who sing and dance among those branches sturdier than hers.

I felt her woes accumulating in her shameful exposure
to wicked love's throes and I wept alongside her.

(Pitiful, unspoken empathy.)

---

I finally make it to the overlook,
and the rugged solitary picnic table--
where I sit and gaze over the cove,
and the shore that lurks beneath
my commanding earthly footing.

Sighing at the merrymakers perched atop their aquatic vessels--
their cries and screams of elation reaching me,
like mocking phantoms lurking in the woods,
echoing off the hollow shells

(and I write this all with numbing fingers
and tearing eyes, blinking furiously
in frigid but calm winds never hiding their presence)--

I see them, closer now as I make my way to the beach;
but how is it I am the one sinking,
when my feet are the ones planted firmly on the shore?

My shoe'd feet seep into the wet sand--
a dull orange, so lifeless and cold;

Infinitely malleable.

As I once was,

in love's embrace.

---

In the sand:
the lukewarm tracks of man and beast--
traveling side by side,
their destinations a mystery to me,
but their paths encapsulated in the gritty earth
where I once again sense the duality of my soul.

Man and beast imprinted in the malleable confines
of my innermost being, where
the ceaseless waves crash onto the shore
of my battered conscience,

and I feel sinking atop my muddy thoughts
the footprints of man and beast--
the biped and the quadruped--
stepping in tune to nature's melodies.

When I acquiesced to love,
man and beast did not step harmoniously
in the sand,
and the waves of lust crashed over my conscience
like the perfect storm.

In utter torment,
I shied from its ceaseless beatings,
but I foolishly dug my withering tendrils into the mutable sand,
and the wind's booming voice furiously knocked me onto my back--

and though her advancing body had suddenly lain atop mine,
with kisses like icy daggers and eyes like amorphous storm clouds--
her words and my conscience
lay heavier on me still;

On the shore,
and in the woods:
Where I lay naked and exposed,
where I lay shameful and remorseful,
where I lay hopeless and tasteless,
where I lay to this day--

rotting in the foliage that once gave me life,
and I in turn,

beauty.

Your love rains down
                                       from the shower head.

Sharp needles of fire
                                                                ­                  dousing cold feet.

                                   It feels like daggers,

                                               and wouldn't be so,

if I hadn't lingered for so long,
                                                                           in my frigid hesitancy.

I must write!*
The transient words pass by my consciousness
like the piercing lights that take dull eyes aback
and linger for a few brief moments in the peripherals--
before disappearing back
into the heavens.

Curse these confounded ink-stained fingers;
your scribblings barely get the thoughts out in time,
and you do so with mortal wounds
of aches and cramps,
and god-forbid,
your pen runs out of ink!*

So you keep your tools sharp
and your stone tablets at hand,
for when transcendent light strikes again:

You will be not be caught off-guard
by serendipity.