With a host of furious fancies Whereof I am commander, With a burning spear and a horse of air, To the wilderness I wander.
Tom O’Bedlam
Born of tobacco, borne on air, Heeding the piper’s fragrant call, Rising, as they lose their form Circles waft aloft then fall Shimmering ghosts of dead ideals Magnificent in their demise (Unlike most human enterprise.)
Wraiths emerge, phantasms form, mutating, dissipating; organic ephemera swirl and dissolve, interpenetrate in airborne Eros, a pas de deux to the power of three, wherein polylectic philosophy is revealed as a dissolving circle:
Rings must rise. There are fires to stoke: An unnameable emotion Mutability in motion… Pipe enthroned in seraphic smoke. The glowing altar: an abyss As coals illuminate the dark The wicked burn: a smoldering spark Below the briar’s rim, a hiss . . . Omniscience, celebrated, burns To send forth children on the air While grace eternally returns Specifically to . . . everywhere. Exhaled, philosophy’s sad ghosts Bow down before the Lord of Hosts.