Why do poets and photographers love fleeting things?
Angled shafts of sunlight piercing a mass
of clouds. A rainbow flashing from dragonfly wings.
Water drops beading like shards of glass.

The fluttering shape of a sycamore’s shade.
The sun sinking into its reflection
In a purple bay.  Smoke’s shadow. The rayed
Curve of a finger reaching for perfection.

Whatever churns, bursts, rocks, flies,
Foams, flickers, roils, evades
In pigments of impermanent dyes
We try to fix before it fades

Once I mourned the endless dying  
Of here and now, the present always past
Elegized each moment, sighing
Beauty is loss and can never last.

But now I think I had it wrong.  In fact
(I learned this from an artist’s eye)
Fleeting beauty reappears faster than we react,
At the speed of a daydream flashing by.

All around, light coalesces into form,
Form explodes into light,
And we live lavishly inside this storm
If we can learn to see it right.

Beauty multiplies, tapering, swelling:
Reshaping, reforming, now familiar, now strange.
This gaudy blur in which we’re dwelling
Is the permanence of change.

THE  SAXOPHONE STORY
          BY RAJ NANDY

The Saxophone is perhaps the most expressive
instrument next to the human voice.
Was made by Adolphe Sax, a Belgian, through
a deliberate choice!
He wanted to offset the tonal disparity, -
Between the string, wind, and brass instruments,
with musical clarity !
He felt that the strings ones were overpowered
by the wind instruments.
While the wind instruments got overblown by
the brass ones instead !
Now what would happen if the best qualities
of these three instruments types,
Could in a fusion blend and coalesces into a single
instrument type ?  
So finally at the age of 20 years, in March Eighteen
Hundred and Thirty Four,
Adolphe Sax created a magical instrument for the
World to hear and adore!
It had the power of the brass, the flexibility of the
strings, and the woodwind’s variety and tone;
Which got christened after Adolphe Sax as the
SAXOPHONE !

Adolphe’s famous composer friend Hector Berlioz
in Paris City,
Gave this new instrument wide publicity!
In 1844 the Sax was presented in the Industrial
Exhibition at Paris;
And subsequently got patented on 20 March 1846.
It soon got adopted by the Bands of the French Army.
Making other instrument makers to become green
with envy!
The Sax was 80 years old when it became part of the
musical instruments of the Jazz Band.
A small bore mouth piece was created to suite the
varying tonal qualities required by Jazz.
Initially, 14 different sizes of Sax was created by
Adolphe.
Today only five types are in use for us to hear and
see;
The Soprano, Alto, Tenor, Bass and the Baritone
Saxophone.
They now form a part of our Jazz music's backbone!
                                                      - By Raj Nandy
FOOT NOTES :
Adolphe Sax (1814-1894) , son of famous musical instrument maker
Charles Joseph Sax of Belgium. Woodwind Instruments = Flute, Clarinet, Bassoon etc. Brass Instruments = Trumpet, Tuba, Cornet etc. String Instruments  = Violin, Guitar, Harp, Banjo etc. The Saxophone today has become the very backbone of Jazz Music!
** ALL COPY RIGHTS ARE RESERVED BY: - RAJ NANDY

Mirrored silver
tag me blue
reflective sky
widgeon, merganser
blithely sail
broken ripples
foretelling
storm

raucous
cawing crows
assemble
anxious ducks
explode airborne
duly warned
silent drone
fateful wraith

Eagle
glides over
the settling
surface
razor eyes
seeking
the meek
the weak

fleeing flock
coalesces
white bellies
exposed to the sun
banking hard
return to serenity
certain death
deferred

in nature
alliances are clear

predator

prey
vigilantly
warning
relentlessly
defending

Shrieking
crow-beleaguered
Eagle
retreats
no match
for those
united
against him

An amorphous cave hides behind a cascading flow of crystalline blue, sparkling and shining like radiant glass.

Inside the incandescent cave, an effervescent and ephemeral scent of dulcet cinnamon coalesces into the air of the inside of this seemingly halcyon cave.

The feelings, the emotions, the sights, all too inexorable in it's ineffable reality. It calls out, with it's mellifluous and beautiful, languid and sirenic voice, incandescent with epiphany,

"Come child of man, meet me, greet me, welcome me, me as the idyllic felicity some dare to even dream of, and then let me embrace you and enrapture you and encompass you in my incorporeal and frozen, evanescent tranquility."

This ephemeral and serene cave now even murmurs and sings a tranquil symphony suffused with rhapsodic zeniths.

It... It truly was ephemeral...

A horrible shriek, a shrill and a repulsive and repugnant and rancid smell. A decrepit cacophony of hollow, anguished wailing and screaming. Pain at my soul, and a harsh, hoarse and coarse voice filled with slaughter and cataclysm. A grotesque, hirsute maladroit leech, visceral and shunned from everything and everyone, even the Earth itself...

In dire straights
the human being's
collective
  conscience
   coalesces
    compassion.
Always to create
in those moments
nothing short of miracles.

Having lost her forever,
he steps off the escalator
into hard sunshine, drops
to the sidewalk and caves—
a troubadour whose songs
have been dismantled
by the sadistic hands
of a subway conductor.

Guitar strings slip his fingers,
and nothing will bring her back.
Not a song. Not a psalm. Nothing.
Not the angelic back
of his leather jacket,
spanned by a score
of safety-pins formed
into silver-studded wings.
Not his listless body,
tattoo-inked and wrecked,
blue quarter notes slinking
down a tight treble clef,
wires stretched across his neck.
Not his mind, spinning
in a head blue-veined
and stubble-shaved.
Not his angry steel-tipped boots.

He lost his love because he looked.
One by one,
the silver pins
have come
unhooked.

Meantime,
far below
the sidewalk,
banished forever,
she slumps cheated
and dispossessed
in the vinyl seat
of a hellbound
subway car crawling
with scorched graffiti,
spray paint-scrawled
filigree spelling her doom.
Ghost of a snake bite
below her knee.  

Mohawk depressed,
she leans against
the train window.
Dead glass reflects
a chorus of piercings,
steel threaded through
skin so translucent
her veins and arteries
glow blue and red:
mapped subway lines
circulating misfortune,
coursing with dread.

The train rattles along rails
encrusted with gems and bones.
Disgorging sparks and smoke,
it thunders into stygian gloom,
ferrying her to a heartless god.

What if her shadow
had made a sound?
A backward glance was all it took
to squander a lavish second chance.

High above his beloved,
awakened by moonlight,
Orpheus regains his senses
and gathers the guitar.
The case flung open
at his boots awaits a drizzle
of tossed dollars and coins,
piteous currencies of loss.
Hard pick between thumb
and finger, a downstroke
strum delivers plaintive
waves of power chords.

The song ignites
a crowd of women
in tight band t-shirts
and skinny jeans,
smacking cherry gum,
their flaming hair
casting embers
upon night air;
radiant specks
suspended
like lighters
in a sunless
stadium.

Spurred by his song,
the covey of maenads
coalesces and attacks,
enraptured, enraged.
A rush of bodies,
the crazed crush tears
him limb from limb,
splits him to close to cipher,
until what remains of the star
on the sidewalk is his heart:
the four-chambered *****
held in a hundred hands,
picked up and packed
into the red plush lining
of the grisly guitar case,
golden hinges snapped shut.

Entombed in coffin-black
chrysalis, the heart pauses
like an untouched drum—
a dormant instrument
awaiting metamorphosis
that, like Eurydice,
will never come.

i belong to the daybreak
when humans with sleepy eyes
and mousy morning hearts
are brave enough to face
the scarily mundane world once again.

i belong to nature
to the hidden wonders of the world
there's unknown modern hanging gardens of babylon
and the secret sanctuaries
where the teenagers of the megalopolis
go to rest.

i belong to the ocean
in the deepest trenches
no man has seen
where it is quiet and still
and darkness reigns supreme.

i belong to outer space
in the galaxies who are
strangers we'd like to know
there's dark matter that swirls
space dust coalesces
and stars are born to die all over again.

i belong to the rain
when the sky cries and
the typhoons turn to drizzle
the water runs through
empty houses and thrift stores in the gutters
and on and on, to underground,
to God knows where.

i belong to the night
to the time when the busiest people
submit to slumber
but a few who are not
bothered by lightyears
sit by their windowsills
to watch the stars.

*i belong to the world
and the world belongs to me.

Silence
At first a void
Then sudden burst of energy
Forces collide
Atoms split and divide
From nothing comes forth something
Radiance breaking free of abyss
Hot gaseous ball coalesces then cools
To form a planetary sphere
Which orbits a citrus giant
Giving off golden light
And warming touch
To embrace a world
And allow the basis for life
All this by chance and happenstance?
All complexity born from
Random motion and chaos?
How vast and unnumbered
The twinkle in the heavens
Yet all alone?
Oh I gaze up at yonder skies
And marvel at wonders
My eyes have never known

The yucca plant from my mother’s garden sits
unattended and on the verge of death next to her
eldest rose bush, now wildly overgrown and lightly
blushing in the cosset of the midmourning sun.  Its
withered rosettes droop down to its bed of maroon-stained stones
in crisp, harum-scarum patterns as if the plant is spending its life
like currency trying to touch its toes.  I oftentimes
find myself wondering if the reason behind this
slow rotting of mother dearest’s garden is hidden within her
five-year absence.  If I didn’t know any better, I’d say
her nursery missed the d
                                              i
               ­                                  g
                                                     g
                                                        i
     ­                                                       n
        ­                                                        g
of her weathered hands.

She was the biosphere of my world; I suppose that
it only makes sense for the earth to match my thirst.  We
sit side by side, that yucca plant and I, as we struggle to
nod our heads towards daylight while we rise on
the side of the house that is more or less
cloaked in shadow; the side that she would sunbathe
on during scorching late afternoons.  Perhaps without her
body giving shelter, all her garden is doomed to
atrophy like muscle in the sunlight.

I find irony in the way that my mother’s favored plant
was the “ghost in the graveyard;” a perverted parallel
to the game that she never wanted us to play.  I think it to be
sort of sardonic that her pride swallowed the possibility of
a cure being found within that ****** plant’s roots. She,
a third generation American girl,
had blood as muddled as the mud
that buried that yucca’s heart.
The boundary line between Mother and
nature coalesces into one:
                                               Gaea
                                               six feet under
                                               melting into soil
                                               I hope she becomes seawater.

My brow furrowed as she read my palm
and whispered of growing interest.
"What?" I asked; I had my qualms
about the foretelling of a future
I haven't decided to live.
But I smell the darkness in the incense.

I trace the tendrils of the incense
with forehead firmly within my palm.
The streets below are live
with persons of little interest,
hustling toward a fuller future.
Renew me, my qualms.

Not that I had qualms,
banana-flavored incense
replacing patois in my future.
The lurid waves slide over my palm.
instill a touch of colder interest.
With each sandy step, I live.

And as the water fills my shoes, I live.
When I quietly lose interest
the ocean shows it too has qualms.
The brine coalesces like incense
as my nails dig into the skin of my palm.
For I seek a better future

than the unforgiving future
that chose not to live.
The salt stings the holes in my palm
and instantly I have no qualms,
just a lingering fleck of incense
arousing mild interest.

The ocean betrayed not the slightest interest
being the shepherd of my future.
Rivulets of water became the incense
That I would breathe to live.
Instinct expressed fervent qualms,
as I pressed my mouth with my open palm.

It was the incense in which I held the most interest.
Her finger traced my palm, mumbling of a better future
ahead for me to live, free from petty qualms.

This isn't the remedial rhythm your grandfather told you he listened to when he was a lad
This rhythm is the sole possessor of unfathomable depths
A melodic perception of what awaits at the steps of cognitive pools
Each bubble coalesces at the apex and pops with a reckless flush
Liquifed sound scatters and turns to dust
You can hear it on your skin
It's slight
But you can almost decipher what that muse was mouthing before you took the dive
Warning: Contents under forever
Sand does not absorb these notes
Infinitesimal grime only shocks and provokes
Until the boiling point is reached
The clock will strike half past infinity before you can even see
Your reflection's hymn ripple across the well of eternity

The moment when time coalesces
When every futile aspiration succumbs
And fragility becomes the armour of the arrogant
When scars are beautiful without a lens
And angels are able to stop crying themselves to sleep

I sense life’s precarious balance    hushed
Stilled    moving to the negative
Our aging rusty colored companion
Lying camouflaged on his brown tattered rug snug
In front of the warmth of the fireplace
Appears uncommonly restless
The living room Kmart clock    a
Plastic cheapness hanging between two white candles
Gives a strike    a moment today or tomorrow

It is bloodless white mid-morning the dog with a start
Throws head back making tags ring letting loose a feeble howl
Our bodies give a quick convulsive ****.
Innate fear acknowledges.
Coming distant its portentous screams shatters    sneaks
Into being     matter of factly taking sway of our simple lives
We sit in coated silence awaiting the
Arrival.

Defeated we stand
Early frost beneath the skeletal body of the silver maple
Grey shapes emanate from the silent visitor
Take form holding her brown corduroys and red sweater

Mom is pushed by unseen hand to her kness
Head bowed no sound
Her only movement hysteria of shoulders.
The tree bark softens allowing dad’s right hand
His face bathed in earthly blood
Gazes upward      my eyes follow up through the maple
Autumn bared     the stars shine beyond the naked limbs.

“Mr. Lawson, we found this underwear along with the clothes in the trunk of a parked car out on Bell Road close to the pond. We’re going to get some more men out there to drag it.”

The underwear was stained with blood.

The family huddles around the fire in the sanctuary of home
As the nets sieve the frigid waters of the silent pond.

Darby jumps up onto dad’s lap
His hand unknowing strokes the
Reddish fur    his eyes as the dogs
Shut to offerings given
Mom sits in the kitchen on the
Edge of a wicker back chair
Taken from grandma’s house
She is holding sister’s white tennis
Shoes against her chest
Rocking back forth back forth
I stand with my left arm crooked
Around the back of her neck
Remembering we once went fishing
At the pond on Bell Road
The hand strokes her heavy black hair

Out the window first light
Shows the tree line of the ridge
The net is empty

Mom is done
She get’s up to brew more coffee
While dad and I go outside to sit on the grey flaking
Front porch and confront the passive morning
Absently I read the comics
Dad lights up a Lucky Strike
The smoke issuing from the mouth
And nose coalesces with that rising from the water
Laden grass     he looks at me
I put down the paper   helpless in the
Company of his pain
Flipping the **** onto the newly graveled driveway
He stands   releasing me
It is still
We listen silently to the lone ringing
From the bell tower of Corinth Church
Up on the hill beckoning the people to
Worship the Methodist brand of God.

Somehow I knew
Dad walks   then runs   toward an old woman
Coming from around the corner from
Behind the woods   she is stumbling
Along the roadside as if drunk or lost
The old woman begins to turn away but – doesn’t
Dad picks her up cradling her as an infant
He slowly walks toward the house
The silence of the bell a muted scream

She is covered in an old grey granny dress
Imprinted with small purple and yellow flowers
Her bare feet are bleeding

After the others had their fun
One of the six
A middle aged man
Had taken her to a dilapidated barn
With **** skins spread eagle on the walls
While moving the sharp edge of a fish cleaning
Knife up down up down between her labial lips
He offered “Cry and holler all you want! You have no home to go back to.
We burned it! Burned it straight to the ground with your precious
Family inside.”

After his play the man took her to
His grandmother’s house up on Ridgeview Road
Just a couple of miles from ours
The old woman looked upon her nakedness and
With the dress   blessed her.
From the vacuous room a whispered
“Jesus Forgive Us “was heard.

Can't we choose the air that coalesces with our blood?
Can't we decide the only time to let our lids shut and unlock?
Can't we pick the only lumps we want to sprout from our structures?
Can't we select the parts we would rather have blemished?
Can't we prohibit the leaky drops of saline our eyes secrete?
Or forbid our visage from exposing an out of control kaleidoscope?
Can't we stop our pumps from thrashing and throbbing and telling on us?
As well as command our malfunctioning extremities to quit giving away our state?
Can't we instead just bring out our insides without dissecting the outside?
Can't we just emit what we mean to sound off by just lip-syncing?
Can't we really do anything without a swad of nerves tell us no?
While having every stretch of muscle and vein say yes?
Can't we just...
Can't we really?

and when at last I rest
I will
forever hold
the mystery of your life and love
close to my heart of hearts
at one with the universe
and as I think of all the things
I failed you with
in so many ways remiss
yet forgiven

the bulwark of that state of bliss
will be to know I loved you well
not perfectly
but well enough to be
the deepest satisfaction
of my life

If such repose is
as they say, eternal
then eternally i will love you well
and when time itself collapses
and the universe, in a reverse big bang
coalesces back into its birth

my matter will rejoice because indeed
the new physics does predict
parallel infinite worlds
that side by side
coexist

lucky me, reborn in an infinity of ways
to infinitely love you once again.

Would not then the Law of One be the Law of Love. No rules just nature within the infinite (I call it the deep and dark, dark referring to the unseen yet it is sentiently known and most readily embraced) deep dark sea of love from where all is sprung. Not only suggesting that all manifest is descended this way but more is available on the demand of our real needs. Yes love is responsive reactive willing in infinite facets this way!!! So I prefer to say love is all there is rather than love is all you need. I call the wild cards the X factor that is our individual willingness's which All are and is interdependent upon. Yet too I know this X factor is a fractal spawning too of loves nature to share All and so All feels for All when otherwise fragmented inwards into obscurity. Love is not obscurence of one another, love coalesces it's own essences. You know I invite All to tell the greatest story here by being bold in meekness. All love All, Ra!!!

I look upon a web that hangs gently
Before me, I look deep within the beads
Of morning dew, I see reflections
Of each part of me.

Each strand was a part of me, I
Was woven of many pieces, Some
Held many dews of water,
While others vacant, the thread
Is clean no dew no spiders
Motion nothing hangs there.

But others a collection of movements,
Dew coalesces there,  where  would
I spin a new thought, what part of
Me is hanging in anticipation, new
Thoughts to be caught and fed upon.

I wondered upon a Web, I looked in
To its intricate design, I saw many parts
Of myself within this elegant creation,
Thoughts were the dew coalescing
Upon silken line, I was empty in
Parts waiting to be filled.

I looked and smiled, touched silk with
The tip of my fingers, vibrations fed
Through like thought, and with that
I walked, I wondered silently on.

No longer connected to the ground
the ultimate ascension is triggered
eyes open as time slows, the feeling
of eternity coalescing.

No longer obstructed from my condition
everything is revealed,
turning all sight upon itself
subsumed in the realization of being

the bridge manifests, and the two shores appear
now at the brink of what joins man and the divine
the convergence of every challenge and disillusion
spurs me beyond the very state of grace

I step upon the bridge,
exhaling one last breath
before air turns into light
as before me the world vanishes

eyes open as the currents bend before me
I look upon the world with perspective
never before imagined. I reach out to touch them
and so, in the hand of God, eternity Coalesces.

There were ripples of the sparkling stream.
The crystalline water was mirroring the blue sky.
That befriended with the sun’s wonderful beam.
Beams of the dazzling looking golden eye.

The background was overflowing with mountains.
Mountains with snowcapped peaks,
Their attainment of such exquisiteness is a real arcane.
What is it above the sky that they seek?

The eagles were gloating about their wings.
O! How marvelous they were to glance upon!
Thrushes flew above the river as they sing.
Grazing on the grassland was a cluster of fawn.

There I saw the elderly yet strong fisherman.
Flinging his lure in an elegant technique.
Attracting catfish and trout as much as he can,
While sitting on the boulder beside the flowing creek.

The loveliness of the lotus was luring me,
Positioned silently on the cerulean water.
The white arrowhead was charming as she could be,
Her petals were diminutive as they always were.

Far away, I saw a grandiose tall tower.
Its peak was reaching for the high heavens.
He stood there taking delight over his power,
Amazed all travelers every now and then.

The heavens above exposed a band of colors.
Little time, after the floating dark skies cried.
I then assumed that our life is filled with squalors.
But don’t worry because later they are all bright.

After the drizzle, dews sat calmly on the grasses.
Scarcely and leisurely moving towards the ground,
The sunlight coalesces with the dew with tender caress.
How luxurious they looked wearing the golden crown!

The children played alongside the river in pleasure.
Girls were collecting flowers to make tiaras and garlands,
While boys were skipping stones on the tranquil water
Their little footprints placed themselves on the loose sands.

And I was assembled comfortably on the greens.
Beside flowed the river without paying any notice.
It cleansed all of my hopelessness and spleen.
Therefore I slept on the nature’s lap with internal peace…

There is a certain unplaced quality to the whole thing
Like it was never planned to look as it does
And the fact that it is the part that we aren’t supposed to see has always appealed to me
The ripples and cracks
Fissured by time
As a clash between flux and permanence
And will bent by entropy
A rusted staircase like a lonely island dangling and looking weak and unsafe
And who knows maybe it is
For the paint is chipped black frosted like ice
But it is hot and the air is heavy
As it always feels in a place like this
For there is rapture in a place that feels like it does not belong
And like you do not belong there
I contemplate the number of feet that stood right where I stand
I think about the installation of such things
I think about the man who stood and wrote his name in paint
About how that got bent like that
About when that wall fell down and when that glass broke
The stories that touched this particular spot only for that brief moment
The stories in which this is not even a footnote
Where the organic flux meets the rigid industrial
And all coalesces into a barren scape hidden away
And forgotten for it fits in neither picture
As the romance of the days that it saw beautifully have long been realized as nostalgic and useless
And a brick may fall and hurt someone
Or they may just tip their hat and continue on their way
But despite all these things I have a sense of blindness
And sublime captured by a world of temporary distinction

We're like two forces of nature

I am a storm cloud
That covers the sky in black
With fury that will tear apart the face of the Earth
My words are a hurricane screaming in the dark
And my eyes dam a flood that would
Erode the mountains into solute
I am the cold that freezes the ground
That cracks the road into gravel
An eruption that scorches all I touch
The kinetic energy of my soul
Is like the shower of meteors
That bombarded the beginning
Of our world
I am death

And you are the atmosphere
You are the warmth of the sun
The darkness and the moisture of the soil
That cracks open a little seed
So that a flower may face the sun
And wonder how it got so lucky
You are the breath of the ocean
And the smell of the spring
You are a bird singing at dawn
After a long, lonesome night
You are the tingle in the chest
That makes people fall in love
You are the kiss that leads
To wonderful things
You are life

But sadly, you are also pain
And no matter how many cataclyms
Occur over lifetimes
No matter how many extinctions
Happen throughout the aeons
You always find a way through that pain

You are so much stronger than I am
Far more majestic, mysterious, miraculous
Storms come and go without purpose
But life's will to survive is endless, amazing
And here we are, caught
In each other's grasp

I can't wait to whisk you up
Into the air and hold you in warmer winds
While we watch our world
Watch the stormclouds
Moving together
Falling apart
While the life underneath coalesces
Cell by cell, a beautiful algorithm

I can't wait to show you
How serene the eye of the storm can be
Instead of all the ****** little things about myself
Instead of how easily
A storm can destroy something beautiful
I can't wait to touch your face
And wash all your sorrow away
With gentle rains

I hate it all so much.
This hatred burns and scalds my skin
from the outside in and rips away flesh
like picking rotted flowers from my bones.

My clothes
are no longer here.
They left ashes in their place
a slow wake of fire dust
encircles me
like its digging out a tomb.

I hear the cackling of the
sturdy floorboards beneath
my feet begin to snap.

I hear the laughter breaking free
from the splinters and feel the spike
of their railroad pike skin pierce me
ripping away failing flesh
like train cars
until I am just cooked bone and hate
and spilled muscle.

My blood begins to soak into the oak
of the earth’s soil.
I hear it boil.
It funnels down through dirt like drain-o.
I peer into the hole like an open casket.
I see the soul of the planet so like me.
All cooked bone and boiled blood.
All rotted flower and liquid muscle.
It coalesces into an ocean of metal magma.

It looks like it knows how to hate like me.
The wakes wave like an invitation.
I feel the gravity of my skeletal frame
pull back into an arched bow
and let go.
I fall like an arrow on fire.
My cooked bone crashes into an alloy ocean
and shatters like fine china
I am fire dust in the form of crashed skeleton
and rotten flower.
I fuse into this lake of burning wakes
until the flames of our hate
soak into a bonfire of failed flesh and metal

I am home here
There is no armament of wood and laughter
There is only hate, blood, bone, metal, and rotted flower

It looks like heaven.

The sweet emotion of forever
Lasts as long as the wind caresses
And buffets the soul on a cloudy day

The sweet emotion of never
Is the repetitive cast into a flowing torrent
Of a flooded river that masks the shore

The sweet emotion of together
Coalesces into a monsoon of parity
That is a parody of the rain that crys

Now or never
This sweet emotion
Will last forever

Blades of wet grass slide softly across the bottom of my feet as I stride across the rain slicken yard. There, barely ten feet in front of me sits an echo. A small boy with goofy looking black rimmed glasses, and thin brown curly hair, sits planted firmly on a makeshift rope swing twists around and around, winding the swing up, than spins in circles as the tension in the rope is released. Smiles, and laughter play out in the shiny day. Innocence wearing its sweet face. The unknowing a better fruit then the bitterness of truth.

I turn away to see a shaded landscape filled with vine trees. Their thin string things whipping back and forth in the wind. Another echo haunts my heart. The young boy, no longer bespectacled runs, jumps, and grasps a handful of vines. He swings in and out of a fantasy world. He is alone in a world crowded with imaginary friends. Pirates swashbuckle as he and the lost boys of Neverland fight and fly. Now the tree rots from the roots tilting at an uneasy angle, and is slowly dying.

A dog barks out into the evening sky as the last bit of the sun’s rays disappear.  The new night is marked by the howls of several other canines. They feel like mournful howls. My mind slips back to younger days and I recall how I would rise at five in the morning to walk both of my dogs. Such sweet shaggy friends, very wary of strangers but oh so loving to me. They are both dead now.

I slip a photo out of my wallet and stare at the crumbled visage of my grandpa. Dark glasses cover his old eyes, but there is a playful smile edging its way across his face. This is, was the face of a happy man. Now, he too, is just another dead thing. I am just another dead thing.
One step becomes another as I make my way to what is left of the old two port garage. Its dulled colors seam to match my mood perfectly. Cracked windows and grey broken siding marking its age like the rings of an old dying oak tree. Small and large rocks painfully embed themselves into my toes and feet. This was easier when I was lighter or at least wearing shoes. I stare at the decimated building imagining the way it was before time ate it all up; standing sturdy with a dog house to the right of it and a car, tools, toys, and other potpourri parked safely inside.

Then, I remember the sawhorses. Those old things with white paint chipped or chipping away. I rode them like unsaddled horses until my **** and ***** ached. Swinging light brown cardboard swords like I was a hero fighting monsters, never realizing the real monsters were human beings.

They took this from my family, those stupid bankers with their stupid mortgages. There is so much history here. Shades and shadows of the past to interact with. Sensations to stir passing passions. A tear coalesces, followed by a stream. I struggle to suppress it.

Squeezing my sore toes together, I pick up mud in between each digit. The cold sludge feels good on my dry skin. Suddenly, I realize that this is it. This will be the last time I ever come back here. A part of me wants to cry some more, but I refuse to yield to that part. These feelings are merely specters of a past long since departed.

The specter of the small boy stares at me from a distance, and I can’t tell if he is looking at or through me. Can he sense my pain or see my disease? My stomach is swelling while I’m stewing in a sea of sewer smelling tumors. I can almost feel the cancer eating me up from the inside. White cells massing like a mad army to march on my various organs. Each ***** slowly consumed until enough fail and I fall. It makes me so ******* angry. While greedy business men plague the world with their wicked intent, extending their lives with wealth and perpetuating human suffering, I have to die.  

I slap myself. The stinging warm pain prevents me from becoming too immersed in my own grief. I refuse to yield to this depression. I go back to the vine tree with a glint of mischievous intent in my eyes. Hands outstretched I charge forth fast and furious. My fingers grasp several thin slips of dried and dying vines. It is only a couple of feet off the ground but for the briefest of moments I fly back in to Neverland. Then the vines snap, I crash into a small ditch, busting my ****. A jolt of pain passes from my posterior to my neck, jarring my spine. When the pain passes I laugh, my face filled with a childlike smile. I guess I’m not dead yet.

Seven billion hearts
float amidst
crimson tides of
revolving tendrils.
Obscure in their
nature, forlorn
in their plight,
a path coalesces
from their pleasure
and pain.

On the wings
of angels,
do they fly?
Torn from their
natal host
in a vacancy
of eternal slumber,
do they reside?
Their leaking orifices
exude the lost prophecies
their primal heir
toiled for.
The timelessness of decay
in a vast plane of
logic and enigmatic
illusions.

With grandeur abreast,
wiped from the millennia
of ancient tales,
do they remain?
A mountain of reason
overlooking a murk laden
lake with prospects
aplenty conceals
the hidden wisdom of
their inner youth.
A barren pursuit
of friend
and foe.

Or inside their fever wrapped
marrows, do they fall?
Further from emancipation
to the gallows of
thought and ill-fated
treasons, do they fade?
An infallible musing
of periled destiny,
ripe with the
wounds of the
forgotten dust.
Their revelations a
twisted grove
of fate
and misfortune.

Seven billion hearts
float amidst
crimson tides of
revolving tendrils.
Once symbols of
idiosyncrasy now
footprints on a
black canvas, a single star
in a universe of eternity.
Simple in their movements
yet aloof
in their time.
A perpetual reminder
of the wondrous
before
and after.

There are shadows entwined in thought,
A place where those moments of lost
imagining go to die where others not
tread In fear of the forgotten taking hold.

But the shadows are taken not by will,
But by the invisible mind that consumes
Them within. This place of creative juices
Are fed upon when lost in forgotten halls.

Flakes of syllables left like snow drifting
In random collision a thought coalesces
But before is birthed in the mind consumed
In this Shadow of an invisible mind.

I feel twinges in my mind. Edited thoughts
Now consumed within, what would they
Have become unknown to late for some,
Thoughts linger never near this place.