Introduction:
What is *Preludium but a time to reflect on what it is we know;
What has gone before, and how it might shape those things to come?

Preludium, or, what has gone before:
An entire world,
A great big steaming musty living breathing screaming world and-
For all we know-
There’s but two souls that care to fill it:

Sly Squint, our latest hero,
Swinging through his city like t’were a steaming jungle
And him the proverbial Ape,
He crouches in shadows on rooftops,
Directing his lust, forceful! At all
That kneels before him.

Then there’s our mysterious wanderer-
One hell of a sorry, stinking, sulky sort is he.
No Name to claim yet garbed in rags aplenty
Travelling on an endless quest
Towards a dying dusk.

Yet we need to draw a Third.
See, in this strange place we find ourselves, riddled with danger and loss,
We need one who knows some things;
One who is up there;
Better yet, one who helped to shape this world.
Because for now we are clueless, vulnerable, shambling in darkness.
And that will simply not do.

So, with haste, dear reader, with haste,
Let us ride for the one with the answers;
The one with more Names than you can count, even if you had a lifetime in which to do so;

The one who holds all the strings.

Wildflower 'neath a
     giant weeping willow,
         comforted by the shade
  her fragrance wafting darkly
      whispered into the wind ~
   she'd been 'betrayed by the sun',
frail tendrils blistered
     of indiscretion below
            burning discrimination,
   fallen neath the cracks
        suffocating a delicate essence,
she could no longer bear the
   deep-rooted superficiality  
         of seeds buried within *****
                    little implanted secrets

Let me tell you the story of my death:

Carving words on the bark of a tree
A poem that means life to me.
Glows through night, my soul delights!

        "Exist beyond my death, oh please...
            So I could live in bliss at least."

But they cut the tree, so mindlessly
Illegally. ****, selfishly!
In chainsaw, I was murdered.

        A massacre,
      ... a massacre of my every being!!

I'm a ghost that forgot, the best in me
Now writes relentlessly
To relive the words, once killed in greed
I found the "papers*", the poems you lead...

Then before me, is some piece of me
they killed.

I died a hero,

Standing aloof in giant ignorance,
    Of thee I hear and of the Cyclades,
As one who sits ashore and longs perchance
    To visit dolphin-coral in deep seas.
So thou wast blind;--but then the veil was rent,
    For Jove uncurtain'd Heaven to let thee live,
And Neptune made for thee a spumy tent,
    And Pan made sing for thee his forest-hive;
Aye on the shores of darkness there is light,
    And precipices show untrodden green,
There is a budding morrow in midnight,
    There is a triple sight in blindness keen;
Such seeing hadst thou, as it once befel
To Dian, Queen of Earth, and Heaven, and Hell.

There is a trail in Pennsylvania that is barely tamed
That winds on down the mountainside and fractures into veins.
It lashes through the trees and wood, like man-made ligh-ten-ning
And offers streams of water tasting pleasantly of spring.
This way is framed with micro-caves and fissures in the stone
Where sweetest water rivulets feed moss that's overgrown
Haphazard wooden walkways dot the snake-like trodden path
Their clumsy steps all akimbo; they bridge the wild gaps.

And even further down the trail, dodging brown tree roots
That point like gnarled fingertips and target untied boots
Below, like uncut diamonds lodged into the mountainside
Gushing waterfalls sing aloud, in ranges far and wide.
Their surging torrents babble in a distinguished harmonies
The wordless wind responds by rustling through the countless trees.

There, at last around the bend, before the lumbered river
A bench there sits within the shade where coolness draws a shiver
The wood is at the mercy of the lichen and the rain
That rush to bring that broken boards back to the earth again.

And there, amidst the other foolish carvings in the wood
Scrawled with hopeful youthful hands that did the best they could
The chips and angles buried in reveal what once was true
This is the final place where I will always love you , too.