Chapter 3

THE BURNING

PENCIL SKETCHES

Staying home, I caught naughty elves watering my piano, growling inside my head.

Faucet drops beating out in harmony a drum tatoo to the tune of a plugged drain, the careless postures of indifference retold lives lived on spindle shanks caught on the obligatory insipid train of obliging a pantry full of ones you love. 44 *************************************************************** EMPTY WARRIORS

The jungle where the meow goes in, is a forest for hoodlums. Trucking up, the empty warriors breakfast on lost impatience, apricot fields away.

Now see them speed away. Their lollipop cars drizzling in the sun. Their apathetic stares really cantaloupe harvests, left too long in the sun. 45 *************************************************************** THE KEEPER OF THE JEWEL

The keeper of the jewel. I file it down, keep it smooth.

I can be found any day, busy disguising the jaded and unproved.

I follow forget-me-nots in a forest pool.

I undo knots in groves of shallow trees.

I pretend unfit sores can sit alongside water smoothed pebbles in a sunlit stream. 46 *************************************************************** ROWING WITH CRAYONS

I see children rowing with crayons across a park lagoon.

They are sagging, they have just killed a blackbird playing:

the lot of you, scribbling to school.

Later on, I retrieved the pieces of paper, ink covered, from a field. 47 *************************************************************** COLLUSION

A surtax on the ecosystem; so many raindrops, mists and bud breakings record spring days, that the movement of sap fluids and other vital juices involves all life on a colossal scale; beyond puny human understanding why green shoots shed restrictions at the parochial level. 48 *************************************************************** GOSSAMER THREADS

I feel like cutting my finger, hiding upside down clinking a canteen shelling peas along the floor.

From the focal point above anything could be. Light dripping upon forlorn gossamer spreads like a balloon.

Merely the vantage point of a perspective quietly threading. 49 *************************************************************** A FACE

A face in the mist, with rain around, clings to bare leaves frowning. A face through the mist, convulsed, plays stationary, perching from twigs. A face, not knowing it, trust it is good. 50 *************************************************************** THE BURNING

The sun is a burning magnet on the water. Durable, our boat is a sizable pretzel in the arms of the bay. Warmth with contortion, the clash of passions tug the funnelled swooned water.

Greenery, that inlet of the ocean, lies precarious and submerged. Life, subsidized by water, is within its hope, bubbling in embers, froth drunk with suds hammered against the boat's edge.

What is this, this sky home of the transparent sun. Blue agony, burning up with delerium, the wet pastel illusion slides against our craniums.

Crass, crass the movement of the waves across a low bow, excessively pleasant. All the more troubled vistas blue with hegemony over earth, drowsiness dropping a plague of lapping edges; a strength pried from graves. This sea of ours sags, heaves in deep displacement, fulfills my liquid caress. 51 ***************************************************************