Mourning the summer solstice as it screams by,
steaming like a freight train racing toward the sun;
Frantic, electric, a furious quest gathering speed,
following an unknown path to a lost memory.

Burning waters beneath the green shade of tall,
winsome trees,
Eternal springs of summer's love, despondent now,
with endless apathy.
Beauty--bound and gagged--captured, held tight
as a fist,
setting its table among tangled, twisted weeds,
awaiting the arrival of forgotten seasons--
Discovering true summer in the tender torture of
gentle souls.

Alongside country roads of brown-red clay,
where wildflowers shrivel, fade and die,
Teardrops stream then melt into Mother Earth,
foretelling the approaching frost, darker and deeper,
than a February night,
Before summer could grasp our hands, pulling us
backward, downward, spiraling into the boiling abyss.

And the freight train bears down, piercing the fog,
roaring forward into the misty horizon;
Heavy walls of moisture daring us to breathe,
finally relenting, a nightmare blown away in ashes.

Drops of glistening sweat dissipate
as knife-bladed breezes bring wintry storms,
white and barren, icy and harsh,
With the trains raging journey exposed--
transcending all emptiness, the hollow desire.

Suddenly, an epiphany amidst the dashed hopes
of mortals,
where mystical tales float within the mind's orbit--
Solemnizing the steady, stinging rain---waiting for an
eternity of sparkling stars--cascading, erupting, exploding
into pieces of dust and stone,
Justifying our existence beneath the heavens.

The separation of God and Man only an illusion,
as the train slows down through sacred hills,
Defying the cluttered search for truth,
now existing as the chosen instrument of change and
ultimate sacrifice--
And one shared moment of clarity among the ruins.