[Lost Animals]
Cats probably aren’t even lost
Dogs are trying to find the way back to you
And then there’s butterflies and wild geese that can fly
thousands of miles and back every year and just know
The way home  

[Photographs of Abandoned Places]
Empty rooms filled with flotsam and jetsam
once colorful but now faded and dusty
what draws us here?
The emptiness, the mystery of why we would leave
our dwellings and go elsewhere

[“Don't Lost" Sign]
Our faces were cold and it was windy
we smiled and laughed anyway
warm from the dim lights and food we’d left behind
Don’t lost what? Don’t get lost? Don’t lose yourself?
Cryptic commands posed by an unknown painter with bad grammar  

[Labyrinth]
Isn’t it strange that we make a game out of getting lost?
Ariadne Gave Theseus golden thread to solve the Labyrinth and defeat the Minotaur
Cathedrals have them too, so we can meditate and walk through them
But what minotaur lies at the center of our labyrinth?
More importantly, can we defeat it?  

[Cultural Appropriation]
A clinical term for the simple act
of erasure, of losing.
A people, a nation a culture, a shared memory
who are we without these things?
Such power in taking them away and reducing the people to shadows.  

[Photographs of Chernobyl]
An eerie empty city of ghosts
The pictures show that nature will take us all back one day
there are trees in living rooms and schools  
The photos of howling, pain, mutation are a warning that we shouldn’t seek to have
So much power.

[Losing People]
Stoics say that when someone has died you have ‘returned’ them
This sounds better than losing I suppose
because they aren’t lost
they are gone. And they’re never coming back
No matter where or how long we look we won’t find them  

[Guiding Stars]
The palest of light that seeps into our atmosphere
we are under the same stars as everyone else wherever we are on this lonely planet
that ought to give some comfort, when I look up at night that I see the same stars
as you. I want to brush them into the palm of my hand and offer their light
to you so you could maybe see your words are what is painted on the inside of my soul.  

[Feeling at a Loss]
My tongue is tied and I can’t even think of words because I can’t breathe
around this knot in my chest that forms when I think of you and how I lied and why I let
myself lose you and so for a long while my heart cried oceans and I begged it to stop
So I wouldn’t have to think about the words that I didn’t say and the light I lost,
the brightest that came from your heart.    

[At a Loss for Words]
When someone says something you’re not even sure you heard right, you’re stunned
because you can’t even think of a response while the blood rushes to your face and
pounds in your ears like waves on the beach will you sit silent, stoic
not wanting to give away heat you feel just under the skin.  

[Losing My Religion]
How can you lose your beliefs? Unless someone stole them
Or the disgust with hypocrisy built on good intentions breaks in you until you lose sight
of what you believe to be real and all you can do is renounce it.
What happens if you never knew what to believe in the first place?
A crisis of faith is averted? But at what price?

[Lost Clothes]
The left sock, left glove, that ugly winter jacket you had as a kid.
Where do they go? Why do they just disappear? You just never find them. What do you
Do with the extras? What happens to the lost ones? Is there a land for lost socks? Are
they lonely, trying to find their other half?  

[Missing Person Posters]
Can you lose a person? No, surely not. How can let someone fade from you so far away
that they go missing? Maybe they let themselves fade. Pulled away.
Of course, they could be stolen, or forget who they are, but that is almost less disturbing
than thinking of than people running away or being lost by people
who are supposed to care.

[Lost Cause]
Maybe not so much a cause going nowhere as one that people tired of
too much work with no end in sight. So they left and let the tenacious ones
the true believers take over, to finish the ***** work and clean up the mess
is that how this grace thing works? Holding your tongue while someone else chases
glory only to abandon it when it is too difficult and they leave you to see it through?

[Lost My Mind]
My mind is currently wandering through some forested path on a mountain almost
on the way to touching the sky or lying on the bottom of a the clearest blue ocean
looking up through the kelp leaves and shimmering fish. Or between words of a book.
So forgive me, I missed what you were saying. I’m sure it was important. I was just
trying to follow my mind to those places. And be somewhere else.        

[Lost Souls]
The kind of thing you say talking about a girl with empty sad eyes raccooned by liner.
Or a boy who is always angry or in an altered state of consciousness,
so he can face his everyday. It is reminiscent of ghosts, who wander, not sure where to
go, or who to trust so they hold their despair and fear tightly against their chests.    

[Lost Time]
A euphemism for fainting. Or maybe used by historians for a time with no records.
It sounds more mysterious, Where can time go, except forwards? How can there be a
lost part of time? it sounds as though time has a private life, that it won’t share.
Unless asked politely. Which is what we do when we investigate the past isn’t it,
Looking for the lives of others.  

[The Lost Generation]
“Don’t wanna be an American Idiot” said Scott, and Ernest, and Gertrude.
So they sent each other invitations to their chic Parisian salons on creamy white paper
and said ‘darling let’s make it a holiday!’ and had a divine time with the French
so they wrote novels of despair and disdain and the pain of being human.
and drowned the pain in champagne and beautiful women and men.  

[Lost in Translation]
Some words that cannot be translated in English especially
ones that are raw and tender and romantic
ones that are universal feelings with no name that everyone understands
but the meaning is changed to make it something no one understands in English
So something universal becomes something ungraspable to all.   

[Lost and Found]
The one who crawled out the cave
out of the dark into the pure light so they were blind
Gave so much to come back for the others out of love?
Or a sense of duty? Or maybe they were just returning, as we all do
as we all will do someday.

I am going to try speaking some reckless words, and I want you to listen to them recklessly.

Burning Man is an invitation to a collective art experience, similar to that of the Jew’s mass revelation at Sinai, to be converted into little children and enter the gates of heaven together.

In Black Rock City, There is no money, no commercialization, only a gift economy of free cooperation, supported by the radical ethos of self-reliance, self-actualization, and radical inclusion.  

One friend, who happened to live the life of a hobo artist, commented that she felt that burners were paying to experience life as a hobo. I understand the experience as a way to live openly without attachment and give freely without attachment, and as the saying goes, the playa provides.

In Black Rock City, There is no us and them, because as one citizen so aptly put it to me as I thanked him for the gift of some unknown chemical, “We’re all ravers here man.” And We we’re and are all raving mad, dancing to the song of the desert, everything everything everything, yet no one died there, no children were harmed.

Socio-Economic status indicators are less apparent at Black Rock City, dress is both shabby and marvelous, as many are in the hippy Mad Max apocalyptic desert tribal grindhouse gear of their choosing, or naked as the day they were born, covered in dust.  

The happiest man I witnessed, sat naked in full lotus, serenely smiling to himself, dreadlocks draped over his shoulders rocking back and forth at a woman’s wedding where she married her self.  He knew the open secret.

This strikes at the heart of the matter, there in the desert, there is an awareness, that every citizen is in an act of participatory art happening in the now, you may wear your body without shame, without scorn or derision, or even a second glance, you may simply be in all your human glory, in whatever mode of conscious, whatever identity or avatar you choose.

Comfort of touch arises in this open, relaxed atmosphere of non-repression, Hugs are standard greeting, and last a deliciously long time compared to our society. Cathartic emotional release arises, encouraged by freedom from social conditioning, laws, and traditional mores. There is a fervent, accepted development of comradeship, the beautiful, sane affection of man for man, latent in all the young fellows, north south east and west.

Rumi’s quote on Zoroastrian’s wheel reads, “Come, come, whoever you are, Wanderer, idolator, worshipper of fire, even though you have broken your vows, a thousand times, Come, and come yet again. Ours is not a caravan of despair.”

In this living environment of artful community empowerment new social standards arise, more equivalent to private desire, as there is increased ****** illumination, new social codes made manifest that rid us of fear of our own nakedness, rejection of our own body.

This stands in stark contrast to the present condition of life for American Person, which is one of deathly public solitude and mass commercialization.
We’ve built a technological Tower of Babel around ourselves, and are literally reaching into heaven to escape the planet. The stupendous machinery surrounding us conditions our thoughts, feelings, and reinforces our mental slavery to the material universe we’ve invested in, the separation and tension this creates can be felt walking down the street avoiding stranger’s eyes.

I say all this tremendous and dominant play of solely materialist bearings upon current life in the US, with the results already seen, accumulating, and reaching far into the future, that they must either be confronted and met by at least an equally subtle force infusion for purposes of spiritualization, for the pure conscience, for genuine esthetics, and for absolute and primal manliness and womanliness – or else our modern civilization, with all its improvements is in vain, and we are on the road to a destiny, to that of the fabled ******.


How can we Americans make our minds change theme? For unless the theme changes-encrustation of the planet with machinery, inorganic metal smog, violent outrage and mass ****** will take place. We witness these horrors already.

Abruptly then, I will make a first proposal: on one level symbolic, but to be taken as literally as possible, it may shock some and delight others – that everybody who hears my voice, directly or indirectly, try the chemical LSD at least once; every man woman and child American in good health over the age of 14, find a kindly teacher or guru guide and assay their consciousness with LSD – that if necessary, we have a mass emotional nervous breakdown in these States once and for all.  

Then I prophecy, we will all have seen some ray of glory or vastness beyond our conditioned social selves, beyond our government, beyond America even, that will unite us into a peaceable community.  I hope this will be understood not as the solution, but a typical and spiritually revolutionary catalyst, where many varieties of spiritual revolution are necessary to transcend specifically the political Hobbesian cold war we are all involved in.

I would invite you to step away from your rational mind
Seek inner space awareness
May the long time sun shine upon you
And all love surround you, and the pure light within you, shine your way on