The camp fire burns high and
Provisions carried from home are passed about.
Laughing faces of the unyet tested,
The over morale of an Emperors finest legion
Marching into Gaulic lands
With heads held high.

Spirits are soaring and blessings are passed,
And the fluttering thoughts of home are flower painted.
Perhaps I will be back before the July sun
Bakes my armored back,
Perhaps I will be back to attend to Love
And its reaping yield
Before a burning sun alters my heart.

If I wrote of Love and her soft caress,
would the crowds gather to bear witness?
If I spoke of her words and
the spells they cast on me,
would they gather to witness its gripping affect?

Oh, if they could only feel her love through my verse,
the whole world would gather round,
pushing and shoving, clawing to near front,
for just one glimpse of proof,
An Angel’s holy love.

The peeling of tangerine shell
Releases its soft citrus smell.

A dawning of Spring,
The tree’s pollen eye-dust spreads free.
White paint-stroke wind swirls and
sways through the plains,
the grass kindly greets in sighing retreat.

Blue skies softly shelter,
filling the days with their comforting hues.
Sparsely dotted roaming cotton clouds dance as
the yellow Sun yawns and spreads its rays,
rousing the slumbering bear from his winter den.

Sounds of the hen’s call awaken,
a signaling for paper to meet pen.
The heart swells and empties
just as the flower’s buds lazily fall open
at the bidding of the Sun’s young light.

An open world, the never ending wood,
A night river flows just beyond the bend,
full of salmon fighting upstream from the wrong end.
A tender letter penned but not sent.
A winged man smiles and whispers visions,
guiding my ascent.

Unfortunately, a penned letter is not always sent,
just as all the hopeful salmon do not
make it back to their springing den.
Some sneak by and continue their uphill fight
but others are clawed and left stuck within the
bear’s teeth, writhing in defeat.

So tired I have grown, of building castles
only to have them overrun by cresting waves.
So tired I have grown, of tasting water on my tongue
but spitting, complaining of its salty burn.
So today I take a dive,
for I've grown sick of the shoreline and
smelling life's salty scent only upon the wind.

So today I took a dive,
head first into that salty steep
and was pulled here by current arms
and pushed deeper by ocean nymph charms.

My body flung about,
counter currents tossing me in circles,
eyes itching red with not a second to blink
and my nostrils jammed full
of the salt that hinted my senses before.

On the brink of drowning,
vision fading from blue to black,
I am pushed to a surface
far from the shoreline from before.
A gasp for air and the seagulls call
beams of sunlight carefully fall
onto the white crests of traveling waves,
and upon my blinking eyes.
Here, on the bobbing wakes of erasing waves,
I begin my ocean days.  

I had become so tired of my earthly ways,
so tired of hating the cleansing dawns
hiding behind the ebbing tides.
So today I took a dive
and began my floating ocean days.

Searing memories of love gone past,
pillars of sand that buckle
at high tide's first crash.
The castle carefully crafted with ***** firmly
in hand, but the waves destroyed it,
my walls, my structure, my protection
and then ran, leaving trailing footprints
outlined in the sand of its receding wake.

Smoke filled dens of drifting ***** scent,
Imagined worlds dancing behind the eyes
of the laying men.
Heads fall back and pupils roll to face brow,
revealing a cloudy unseeing white.

What lies behind the eyes of laid men
that makes them respond to the sweet song of
lotus flower time and again?
Are they taken to that Mediterranean isle visited by
Odysseus in his journey, the idle isle where time lazily flows
and sunrise and sunset have no meaning at all?

If I was bunk mate to Odysseus on his mission home
and our boat met sand on this secluded cove,
would I see it for what it was?
After tasting my first sweet lotus petal, offered
to me by beauty divine, could I resist a second kiss?

Would I have bravely boarded the ship away,
eyes hard and mind set on my destination,
or would I have planted feet firmly to sand
and wave as the brave ones sailed away to face
the ever abundant misery of reality?