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Dec 2014
A red river runs with me- through the night
  and the heart of the city. “Burst the banks!”,
I yell but his movements stay slight.
Bobbing along, to the moon we give thanks,
for it’s filled their minds with the expectance of fright.
The wrong time bends its way toward the right.
Everything else bends too, to fill in the blanks.
  We’re starting to spill over. The flood comes tonight.  
The blood that I run with will stain your hands,
The river will coarse through young and old veins.
But nature doesn’t come calling out any demands,
She moves us-sweeping and cleaning up mans stains.  
Times hands are broken. Your guess is as good as mine.
Each horizon I’ve arrived at, they always move the line.  

I fell into the river from a childhood nightmare-
And sometimes I fall back home in the day.
But each place is the same- Scarily rare.
You can blame it on pixies or blame Gray-
Or any kind of thing that makes a young mind aware.
But I’ve laid my thoughts out and stripped them bare.
Pens cruel ******* of what I called real
taught me not to get caught when ever I steal.  
   I borrow thoughts that tie me in tight knots
as I try stitch them into a portrait of a woman.  
But they always twist into fantasies plots
just to burn out in the fires they were fuming.  
So hear I drift alone in a thick and red river,
Creeping with the wind and the moon as we shiver.  

At one point, a wholly spun world now ago,
were days when this river bread new life.
It worked mens hands to the bone to grow
family and cloth each beautiful wife.
Helped purpose find its way to the heart
of each voice that was silence by a no.
The river shares snippets of his life with me.
Speaks a a story that my eyes can see.  
    He told me his plans to wash away the old,
now that those in high places think they’re above-
He floods the ground as this story is told,  
Sweeping up lost voices and spirits in love.
The river has given us life, like so many before,
one day he will whisk us off to a warmer shore.  

There are thousands deep under his water,
and some who float just above his open lips.  
With the love like a fathers for his only daughter,
he lets us drink his life but only in sips.
For greed can so often father slaughter.
It created hate in nature when it caught ‘er.  
Tore her apart, one sin after another.
Then sent us cutting out hearts- brother from brother.  
          We surge through the cities old and cold veins,
collecting each drifter lost in a dark way.
With the eyes of the pretty, the logicals brains
and the patience of listeners, we sway
with his rhythms and with no need to pray.
We’ll sway till the morning of a red skied day.  

     “ When now was never we dreamt of forever,
   of days shivering madly down this old cities river”

Through the black night, we sang these words of hope.
Thought one day we’d wash up in our old city
and walk on its streets and it’d be able to cope.  
To see it from the bottom and marvel at its scope.
Not to just walk and think “Oh its Sucha' pity”.
Those days when concrete handed me rope
and pointed me out toward tree’s on the horizon
are over. The grounds now are on the risin’.  
           Like hell being filled to its level,
we drowned demons and free’d souls.
But only for a second could we revel,
for our buildings were built without holes.  
And those finely suited sit their grinning,
Our old structures seem to have saved them.

“ We drowned in the waters we were swimming,
But were the only ones who ever had braved them”
C J Baxter
Written by
C J Baxter  The ether
(The ether)   
377
   M Tamura and SPT
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