Down the valley, the green oasis fades into wind-swept sand dunes, dunes like those seen in Arabia, but smaller and bounded by the mountains. The shrubs and tufts of grass obey no sharp boundary with the dunes, but rather meander into and out of the neighboring ecosystem. Sand and camels at 12,000 feet, ranges away from the sea, but once upon a time... high altitude valley -- strange worlds squeezed between two mountains
orange temple gates, dripping rain water -- mental crosstalk
promised turquoise waters; instead i get a concrete color
midways announce themselves at a distance jangly music discords with organ toots arc lamp light and spastic dancing colors but i find myself there dream-style swift my disorientation is complete i can't tell color from sound / it's all loud nothing is in focus because all is in motion neon red is a shard of electronic music my eyes dart about looking to rest on something painless my ears try to hold just one tune from the cacophony twinkly music runs my spine as I wonder how a god could deal with all the voices, all those voices, at once
I roam the old city, gazing at Gothic gargoyles and touching stonework made by men long since dead, wondering how I ended up in this chunk of time, rather than one in which this land was all just forest or marshland, or one in which we all wait amid the rubble to blast off to some secondary hive of humanity.
If you can dance in wild, weird ways,
then you are truly free.
If you can’t, while you’re home alone,
you’re a bodily detainee.
A prisoner of life, itself —
a man who never was —
a tragic figure cut from plans
who will do, but never does.
I saw a field — once sunflowers —
now reaped at harvest time.
Just stiffened stalks and wrinkled leaves,
and one head past its prime.
Those glorious yellow petals,
drooping — facing the ground,
were the only way I knew the
crop that’d been mowed down.
How sad to be a survivor
who lives by a bowed head
once the ones that faced the sun
have joined the newly dead.
