The Reincarnated Zookeeper

The Reincarnated Zookeeper

L. Edgar Otto      01 October, 2013

(for last Fireblossom Friday)

If there is no final end of the world, it renewed

all the returning sentient souls chimera reviewed

The polliwogs try to cross the border, dandelion

pickers digging our fields far from blue eyed DeLeon

So history would relentlessly chain us in its clockwork

but were we not once brothers, so too where alights the stork?

Still, in another time my pincers red, not blue black ants

mongrel donkeys revolution red, no blue elephants

Like all unbirthday souls at the Hatter's tea party

that fill his top hat cups with laurels so hardy

Let Larry, Moe, and Curly gouge out their eyes

the peace sign knocked us down past knee or thighs

While Shep and sheppards flash their dairy aire

Doing hard time with them, we souls Lucky Pierre

* * * * * 

Apple Chill

Apple Chill

L. Edgar Otto  Sept. 27, 2013


Did you ever write something that as the author you had to pause and take a breath to laugh?  Hey, Myrtle, I'm still fertile, thinking there is always time to save yourself for the right one... Otherwise, how would life keep on imperfect yet always nothing new of promises under the sun?

* * *

You do a lot of sleeping in your Margaritaville
Too hot to wear pajamas so keep me up, your tempting garden traps me in the thrill gouging out, covering my eyes in your Apple Chill

So I wrote a song for the doll house ladies
at their tea and poetry, about some loyalty to a place
like your warm body next to me and thin iron curtain frilly lace - no time for anything else, unrequited love
fulfilled always to do and chase

Help, call 911, I've gotten up and I can't get down
Madam I'm your Adam - nothing works, no sleeping pills,
no cold showers in a Viagra monologue helps your night sweat hours moonlit fog- I know in your change in innocence it was not me that got you wet

But I'm not ready for the old folks home yet
in the afterglow no sharing of a cigarette
addictions, pre-existing conditions Obama mama care bills
I playing doctor like a Chaplin on a hill yet
only human hairy true man still alive
despite your apple chill

So, here's the rub, lub dub, lub dub, I your caring actor
no co-pays that rob, no chiropractor, can do the job but its gotta work both ways to fill the loom of days
So keep me up, your tempting garden, trap me in the thrill
covering my eyes in your apple chill

* * * * *

Footnote: you see I almost went to bed before I wrote of the New Mexico miniature room for the imaginary garden... a friend I have let stay in my front room until she finds a place- a dignified safety shelter has me rub her neck by the fridge where there is a problem that may need surgery or heal on its own - I went out earlier for advil and a cheap can of margarita...and I better start reading the ingredients in those energy drinks if I buy another for myself...  I wrote this because a new tune came out well on my guitar this morning and I hope the poetry here is taken as humorous, for the open mikes comic scene and our graying human and current event conditions.  Maybe comic relief from the dignity and professional bar of your poets- so this still related to the prompt but it is about an overview of what we are near or at a distance from our homes, times, and each other... mastering perhaps the inside jokes of cliches as philosophy.

Navajo Rug and Table Made of the Cottonwood Tree

Navajo Rug and Table Made of the Cottonwood Tree

L. Edgar Otto   27 September, 2013


You see we do not know when is our last supper
We can make a calendar for the era, aim our stones and
pyramids to the season's clock of skies.

As if there is a past, our ancestors around us but
Receding into the distant dreams now miniature yet
the Virgin mothers all stars and moon beneath her feet.

Dry and hot the dusty desert yet night cold the need for fire.
Inspired eking out a living, time painted in still-life waiting for
better dreams to come, that this dry flower feast be not stillborn again. 
.
The clay pots and teeth decaying corn, the woolly rugs
Woven with the colors of the clan and gleaned silver turquoise
mirror glances, windows to within.

Hearts spiny needled against the drought like starlight on a
Moonless night guides us to the once wide ocean time
That even ghosts gully dry cherish, drink the morning dew.

Returns again cattle rustlers dangling from the cottonwood
Trees, vigilantes and lawless poverty, a feast in a bowl of fruit,
the sprouting cactus flowers amid the smoke of sage.

* * * *

Footnote:  see the photo  New Mexico Dining Room (1940)
September 27, 2013
Imaginary Garden with Real Toads

Sometimes a horny toad's eyes squirt blood...

(Inspired eking out a living, time painted as a still-life 

that this dry flower feast be not stillborn again)  Marian's revision approved.

I was thinking of the fruit in the bowl in the pictures and that art student exercise as well, trying to capture motion in a snapshot or slice

forsooth, you  give good advice       In the flurry of writing this I did check some of the editing and spelling but did not think about the accidental coherence of the underlying themes at all...   life is a long prison sometimes and to escape the mundane we are given a runaway sentence...

You Were No Angel (Chapter 1)

You Were No Angel (Chapter 1)

PublicFriendsFriends except AcquaintancesOnly MeCustomClose FriendsEau Claire, Wisconsin AreaSee all lists...FamilySelf Employed forthcomingGarringer High SchoolCraddock High SchoolUNC Chapel HillUW-MilwaukeeAcquaintancesGo Back

L. Edgar Otto   26 September, 2013

I had the urge to write this for the imaginary garden's next Open Monday...

Chapter I.  Walking with Jubal by Silent Sam

Jubal left the psyche ward at South Wing and faded into the streets of summertime among the stoned hippies in the university's quad by Franklin Street.  A casual passer-by the wall along the sidewalk were people would sit and meet would be hard pressed to tell what in Jubal's thoughts and manner was the difference.  I could not at first until he started shadowing me and I invited him to sit and talk as I was wont to do anyway that summer sleeping at night under the magnolia tree, by day meeting a wide variety of people. I was waiting another semester to finally be admitted to the school after coming home from the service, yet so free and Southern lazy the pace so many hours to spend in thinking and laying in the sun and grass waiting for my tie dye tee shirt I washed by hand and put on to dry.

We walked through the quad then sat at the base of Silent Sam,  a statue in honor of Confederate soldiers with the quote the word 'duty' as the most sublime sentiment, word in the English language, and a note of just how many this one state above its sisters volunteered for the Civil War.  The locals called him that for some reason I never found out, yet he was a center of focus for graffiti constantly sand blasted away as some students protested the Asian land war and Nixon spelled with a swastika or Amerika with a 'k'.

"So Jubal, why are you following me around my walks?"

"You are a god sitting on the wall or bench writing.  When you shuffle your feet sparks are given off.  The streets are filled with empty people, as well some dark demons and others hiding away in hope their evil schemes are not discovered.  There are a few other gods also, some come by you, but when you sleep as so many students do in the quad you find the perfect spot in the open not to be disturbed.  When that girl threw her kitten on you, you did not startle or lash out but cradled it looking up at her and smiled."

"I am not a guru you know... I am just passing my time trying to make sense of these twelve dimensional equations so I can find good themes in music."  I told him thinking he sounds smart and that I might just bore him so that he goes away. He seemed have an effect of keeping my other friends distant save for Sleazy (we all had nicknames back then and few knew he real ones let alone the last ones. I just kept my first name, Olney... then again I missed the drug revolution, and the free love revolution, and he revolution revolution.)  After Sleazy sit awhile then left with his air of seeking a brother acting out the theme and philosophy of the series Kung Fu, Jubal said he knew Sleazy was one of the gods too.

He replied to me in a way one cannot really tell how sound someones thoughts are, especially if such confusions may be caused by the confusion in the society, the state environs- the schizophrenic society but as Kikergaard said. to the corkscrew the knife is crooked.

"Well, I understand really, I used to go to school here before the airplane glue burned my throat.  I have a whole proof of the four color theorem really, worked on it for years.  Now I just sell matchbooks on the streets.  Match Scratch! Get it, match scratch..." he said with pride of a poetic grin.

I saw Jubal twice later on after one of my many moves to and from the small village, university town of Apple Chill.  My bride and me took up his offer to stay in a trailer with his girl for the night, a redhead he met in south wing we found out later.  But she was so angry only his touching her calmed her down but it turned out he would beat her and Jubal's visiting brother told him it was unmanly and called the police.  We got a ride from them to city line of the next jurisdiction as Jubal was living just outside the village line.

Much later we lived farther out into the countryside in an old farm house of brown wood our kids called Gingerbread house.  One day Jubal is on my porch and wants to come in but he is lighting matches just for fun and says he could not get into his trailer next door.  He used to live there when he was still a teen.  I had just heard from my black neighbor that a white man had tried to climb into her screen window and scared her little girl.  So I told him to sleep on the porch on the hammock until morning.  He also asked if he could keep a veterans plastic card trying to sell me insurance that had come in the junk mail and fallen on the porch.  I said sure as it calmed him down and seemed to make him happy.  These were after the days this new credit card  idea was no longer investigated by the city's detectives  as theft or fraud with fines worse than for marijuana.  I mean all hippies knew where the unmarked cars were, once even  Taylor James yelled across the street if a friend needed grass and tossed him a lid.  The detectives near by did not seem to know what was going on.

"It is just I am afraid of the snakes." Jubal said as he climbed into the hammock between the back porch poles. 

"You will be OK as I have caught all of them.  My wife afraid of moths up North is not used to the black snakes climbing up the tree when she is outside crocheting  or reading when they rain down from time to time while looking for bird eggs.  But whatever you do. do not open that white five gallon bucket full of the snakes I intend to let them go across the highway and river.  I just cannot wake up the wife and babies to let you come in." - which I thought must sound to him like just the evasive polite excuse it was as we talked through the window screen.

Of course there was no way I could sleep even after he ran out of matches and asked for more which I of course said I did not have any.  Then nodding on and off trying to stay awake in a chair  I hear a very large crash, a gasp and the sound of running off the wooden creaking porch.  Jubal must have thought I was lying to him about this too so he opened the bucket and let out a dozen and a half of various sized black snakes -  I never saw him after that.  But apparently in looking back that explains why some of my relatives were called by the deeper mental facility and for a year or so thought it was me a crazy veteran confined to the state's nuthouse.

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Footnote:

I add this as a list of comments for the  secret life of bees Sunday mini challenge (my schedule is all mixed up). as it is likey some of the toads may show up here Monday Sept. 30th.

Jumping from Lilly Pad to Lilly Pad     L. Edgar Otto   Monday, 30 September, 2013

Maybe something like this would be good to include for other hard prompt projects?

Since the imaginary toads evoked so many poetic moods save the prompt sentences I did not at first respond to,  I decided to put them in one spot... all the bee stuff, and the back to the earth and good rhythm of life in the fertile soul... Bees can collect pollen for honey over thousands of acres far from the hive...  but I have made a lot of candles after all...  To all the Toad dreamikins...

* * * * * 

Testing if I could post... Well, this quote has interesting images too.  I mean, life is like that running in braids mother to child... or unwinding it with schoolmates...and of course occasionally the boy in the desk behind you dips one in ink and maybe learns to write a poem...   To Kay

I once saw a toad, he too on the hunt for small things in the grass and do more than aim for a moving small object...  I almost laughed when it rolled its eyes around and blinked them hard... for it had swallowed a bee...  I saw another that swallowed a lightning bug and its belly was full of blinking light.  Thanks.    To Margaret


Wow, I get the sense that this bee prompt for all our stories and your reaction can be seen as starting from the idea of the situation from the flower’s standpoint.

Thoreau in Walden remarked how he was struck by the intimate specific relation between a particular insect and a plant… Even in the dust and time here you have touched the transcendental.   To Hannah

I should add, that the sting can sting you long after the bee is dead
I think nothing of grasping the hornets off my child... but bees, they will put up with a lot before they sting and many times
I cupped them in my hands and let them free out the car window... We like them are individuals but then
so is the hive one life that depends on the health of the Queen.  To Susan

If I had posted on this I would have singled out that quote too...

But what Mama Zen said... only there would be too much to comment on from inspiring poetry...

I can hardly imagine falling asleep even with a few pages of this book

I suppose if I were a bee I would not say we bees buzz... but drum.  To Susie C

No wonder, down home in the South, bittersweet the broken combs and propolis,
candle wax and lingering sunset, the work of a gift of thousands of flowers to heal,
a spoon of sweet with the songs of medicine...drawn out sincere that calls casually or cradling another
Honey or the will awakened to live in a sugar pill...that as one precious bee can sting but once
Alone again and winged, we are and find the sunrise sunlight...  to runaway sentence

Wisdom indeed, and enhanced... you rock...  To mama zen

Kisses sweeter than strawberry wine, we lived among the reeds and Christine Ressi's, damn rusty tractor. love a compensation as much a distraction that we to build a garden must toil the ground... yes, I recall, but it is hard to when the vision was still not far away though we could not take it all in then deeply- our longing heart held firmly beyond distance.  To LaToyna


So true, how much we taking it fore granted that at the end of day we find we have to learn to love again. But the birds sing at sunset as well come morning, and even at high noon when eclipse. Beyond this and far from the city lights not one bee that fills our night…but a thousand thousand suns a swarm of starlight…  To CC Champagne

Or the mournful whispers of stars as the rest of the universe flies away from us...  To rene foran

* * * 

Birds and bees and wall flowers...yeah, songs and audible buzz, But without this there would be no Honey Dew Mellon's.    To Herotomost


The stealth of the star covered inner jaguar that knows sometimes it is better to walk away from a fight and that takes as much courage.

The moon drives us Menead crazy but its drag is lagged and O so strong, just out of reach our desire to flow with the streamline dolphin's grain until vanishing into unknowns past cloudy horizons to find our self at naked singularity and the spacious now...


Or I could read it to say it simply in lesser enduring lingering words where at fleeting last we could touch   "I am not asking that you love me, I just want to know my friend..."  To Fireblossom


I cannot recall as a young child I noticed the stars in the sky had depth and were more than white dots on black... a little later I aimed my telescope to the moon, some trick of  chipped lenses that painted its caves and craters with all the hues lost in its stark white.  The outline of the bear or Hercules and Leo vanished on the celestial globe come florescent night inked at day...  Mystic prism indeed as well from deep within our thought dyed far richer than those stars, my poet friend. To Debi Swim  (I had to post comment here)

To bee or not to bee... we still walk around chained to each other in doubts and all that fake honey on the shelves that fool us thinking it is just as sweet... we are still trying to tweak that poem...  To Ella

        ************************************************************************************************************

Nothing Today Save What Wisdom Inspired by Ye Poets in my Comments

Nothing Today Save What Wisdom Inspired by Ye Poets in my Comments

L. Edgar Otto    Monday Sept. 23, 2013

For the Toad Poets  whom I thought of today passing by an old lady's garden who once asked me to help her up when she was stuck on the ground at her digging.  So I took this photo...I got some of the comments in, sorry if I missed you...

* * * *

The Great Grand Joker Calls Neptune Up to Visit Him in Overworld

The Great Grand Joker Calls Neptune Up to Visit Him in Overworld

L. Edgar Otto 10-Mar-12    Posted for the imaginary garden toads   Sept. 18, 2013 beyond the stirring of chaos by a Trident, but fivefold... you see, not only may the ancient gods have been alive in the blossoming of the world with gifts of olive oil or horses for the awakening of Greece and science, but as embryos in recapitulation our individual hearts also go through these stages where such gods were real and yet beyond time and trickster gifst of Trojan illusions.  So we pass thru the shells of Dante's heavens and hells all for the face of Beatrice beyond and outside of time, up from the chaotic sea to walk upright and firm, the pray again to gods higher than the stars and sun.

****

In the great silence the continuum remained undisturbed
and the sacrifices made for the fisher folk that they continue the cycles of life, sweet and far from equilibrium. The multiple dreams of the SphereFather that set the plan of the village and their clocks were never know by the people save some vague and haunting thoughts that put a lone and moving star in the night sky, but it was without a name.

The SphereFather broke into a few then a myriad of mirrors.  Some blurring and some crystal ice like angels immortal down to the last of a bottomless pit of nothingness without limits, the precipitation into the being for their world as if not unique their snowflake souls.

Olney was the fifth of the dreams, the SphereDream, integrating through time the depth and span of creation, walking the endless beach near the central city of Far Rock'a'bye yet returning there a thousand times and taking supper with the villagers at Mullet Port at the mouth of the wormhole just outside the seething hive of the city.

"I don't know, SphereVirgin, there was once a place before my hair went clear and I became in this world the ghost of vanished quantities gone nova.  The endless walk has to end sometime as if to return to the bright star that appeared from the beginning.  But I will miss your thin veil vanquished and our mixing of scud and phosphor light although I have to read your mind and you act as if you had a life of your own."

"You must think highly of yourself, Oln. You always say that there will be an ending to the work and the walk but again the better part of dreams break through.  I will be surprised if I come to believe you for unlike those who seek oblivion you seek the immortal light that cannot be beneath the measure of the smallest grains of sand or beyond it all the tragic vanishing of love and life into the silence of the sea.  Let us keep some things secret in our cycle of the dance, I mean it is the colors and the thinness and the promise that is depth enough to weave a blanket for your dreams tangled in and renewed awhile as I remove my underpants."

"It is never you, my Mare-maiden, that mellows me and draws my heart and soul back to this fading world.  It is the new ones we spawn and yet they cannot be but less than us, not us, and in sorrow and joy they go far beyond us in their right of being and as us immersed in the design while young and living."

"Oh yes, my Neptune, we are drawn to the knots of the dance despite ourselves knowing the peace or loss after the exhaustion spanning the single sea, return to the sacrifice in Pisces, chaos where all things may begin again- but I am lost in the cycles of the moon, sometimes full, sometimes angry, the scandal welcomed when its missed of the eclipse, and often angry for no reason wherein to tame me you go forth to war or to hunt, my hidden light to guide your way as there is all there is, and make you track the source under the threat that the scampers leave no tracks and dripping wounds in relief on my winter snow for how else can I tempt you short of my perfume odorless and blowing far in the indifferent wind?"

"I did not chance meet you at your doorstep and as you, M'Lady I fretted if sleeping outside under the stars alone was not the better course, a refuge and a prison if only the moshies would not bite and the panthers seek my blood.  In the nuthouse I could write given enduring solitude.  I came to you with the beginning of the universe and of free will and crossed that thin silk curtain aware that all beginnings forewarned the disciples of the seeker advise one does not do errands like draw water or pick fruit and light fires for the damsel in the house or his path goes astray and she traps him in her web of passion. Like in the over and the underworlds life and wisdom begins with the once and only unique first kiss. If you settled for me by chance, you settled only for that within yourself like romance that is blown by autumn leaves in wind.  If you had to kill our love, you did not have to rend."

* * * * *

Gravity and Dark Flow Pushing against the Nothingness

Gravity and Dark Flow Pushing against the Nothingness

L. Edgar Otto     18 September, 2013

I evolve and climb up on the beach so feel the heaviness
pushing down on me, far from the freedom in all directions
weightless in the sea.

Gravity, its flow and direction plus some change of colors and flavors, the seemingly unbroken gel of water, sand that gets into everywhere, and the sting of salt.

Overall and universally constrained in unity or some local knotty line thru space, gravity may make a world of layers that its boundless formal cause will quantum-ize as much as we fancy she needs to be to distinguish the hearts and seeds of cells and atoms, of flowers.

As if an indefinite dream outside and independent of the motes of matter and self sustaining rolling waves its reach seeks everywhere in the twilight state of indefinite Being pushing on the illusion of solid ground it too illusion, against the Nothingness.

But she that cradles all can tunnel thru the shells and layers, bring to our choices of endless arrays of dominoes her source of endless touch in fall.

She is cloaked by our imaginations as some turn away from watching too close the heat of her naked singularity.

Her belly dance and bells and Doppler shifts of time only the long lived mayflies in their long life time can hear or see ride the loops in circles floating on the waves its center fixed.

She can sunbathe inside the hole of an inter tube in perfect calm against the crashing seasick rocking of the sea. Only from her view there's nothing in between infinities reached as proven or not provable as she.

So independent and indefinite, her matrix a change of mind sharp her intuition beyond her ballet spins or ice sheet toe picks, to the music judged by numbers the reentry and ritual of her half whimsical dreams.

Her vision beyond the insight of higher things half free in symmetry or branches broken, a weaver of knots of ropes and strings in the natural dimensions as she mediates a trinity of persons different yet the same, finds higher bed sheets of knots and one sided arguments that snap until the work of her fingers misstep and rewind.

Her dance to feed the molten core of worlds and stars, galaxies with bars can appear reverse in retrograde. In her dreamy ether no speed of light finds certain measure nor does it change yet she can fold things in dimensions far beyond our few of time and fate and narrow shadows reduced in n-ply reentry to condense shapes Platonic.

Such is her non-necessity that we may conceive and be convinced of those that tenably can be the exception save like her not directly observable nor provable the symmetry or asymmetry of up and down as principle aside.

Somewhere in my dream the weight of the world grew heavier and heavier as if I were moved slowly from the moon to Jupiter.  I could not move too far and eventually had to stay where I was, lay prone on a bench as did M'Lady we holding hands against the shrinking world reclaimed by the pole of night.

* * * * *

Small Craft Warnings

Small Craft Warnings

L. Edgar Otto   17 September, 2013

In our deeper dreams than those that review encounters of the day and set our memories, our throes and fall as we pass thru the wide wall of sanity before we make sense of all the creatures and fantastic worlds our unlikely stories ground us in mangled pictures we impose to protect our rest that for awhile we do not startle back awake, there in our second sleep like a second death we rehearse imagine warnings, fight the shadow beasts of night.

Or is there a real place to go down into some imagined future that fate itself binds us to foreseen actions we cannot change our dreams walled off too far from others that we no longer connect to each other once we have touched in shared entanglements save some parallel place, space time travel the echos and actions to which we can make a ghostly difference in some other world?

I caught a lucid dream before it was forgotten of a place far away I had never seen before, a warning horn startled me to awaken, to seek some level of familiar world of home yet felt at home there awhile until like a lightning bolt's echo going around the globe and coming back the static overloaded the crystal cat whisker whispers of my mind's sensing waves of radio.

I was walking down the streets, the capitol stood high in the distance but grew larger as I let it guide me closer.  The isthmus grew more narrow between the two lakes.  The streets had familiar names but it was summer time, and a joy to just be where the snow cover lingered but I did not know this was some future bright and not a wishing to take flight from the reality of an empty depressing season.

Odd plants growing by the street and on the bricks of buildings, in the gardens and the lawns were different than places I had been but neither these nor the town seemed to bring to me that sense of fear of strange lands and strangers
when on the road open to shadows of the unknown.  The motor and specks on the bricks and the painted houses and picket fences with many layers seemed to be there so to see the thousand stored memories in the air from the minds of brick layers on some particular day, of some particular brick pattern they had long forgotten so deep into the years - or like the no two snowflakes the same in the complexity the whole season of them, and all the seasons over time, that I somewhere found time so to leave awhile my footprints.

Just one glimpse of a hint of chilling resonating in the lower notes of my spine, that from where time folds back again into itself to take a clearer or different form, a teardrop like a world in a drop of rain of denizens in the distance really small, on the face of my indian grandmother stopping a moment in daydreams as she roasted the acorns, and fried some fish, here caught between the lakes and the isthmus, a warrior chief and his tribe were subdued by the federal force leaving too damp to preserve paper treaties what was still left in the grass of their dew.

As I came to the canal, briefly watched the water fill to height and the sleek fast pleasure craft within it, I crossed the street and walked along the wall.  Being raised near the Eastern ocean I knew of fog horns moaning in the distance at night but did not know such a warning near these locks would be so loud.  As I turned the corner I saw a little girl fishing with her cane pole by the bank in the park like grass and a Spanish man near her.  But she was close enough to the road to be startled seeing me appear from behind the wall just at the time the horn blew loudly.  So startled she jumped up and fell into the canal.  I rushed down as did the Spanish man and jumped into the river but we could not find her in the tangles of the growth and mud, and for awhile it felt like I myself would be trapped and drowned - then woke up to the chilly room thinking how strange and creatively intense our dreams.  We sometimes avoid the final ground of our dreams as we fall.

Yet, a year and a half later I found myself in that town chasing a job in the New Orleans style restaurant and on a day off decided to walk to down town.  I would use the Capitol as my compass and guide.  Sure enough the scene became familiar as if I had been in that place before as I came upon the horn, one that I found later would act as a warning to all the small craft in the lakes for changes in the weather such as storms.  Then I remembered the dream. I wondered if this premonition like event was destined or if we in some sense were free to change it.  I did not know but I hesitated to turn the corner by the wall and waited while the horn went off sure enough as if this was a certainty.  Then I slowly peeked around the wall half curious if I would see a little girl.  With their cane poles I saw her and whom I presumed her father holding hands walking away down the grassy park and nearby road.

* * * * *

Footnote: this story inspired by the Monday open link poem by grapeling.

Fork Falls Island

Fork Falls Island

L. Edgar Otto    15 September, 2013

The secret place , out of the way, in the city. Upstream of the old bridge where the channel splits around an island in the river's center the rapids begin to fall.

Ducks, geese, and cranes know the place, pass by in season unaware what forces of town will banish them, remove the wetland oasis in the concrete desert. Give them a trial to adapt to toxins, cling to the roadside, railways, and rivers ever less pure what was the natural prairie fauna and flora.  A bounty then on these half domesticated breeds as if they no longer fit into the world and are in the way, so do not matter.

The island goes under the flood waters three times under that its life like terrain saturates so reviews its life in a second before its final freeze and its ghost departs the second and vanished final time.  Such a drowning in the burst of light prepares the way, its path and self-vanishing.

The boatman over that river Styx between this sunlit shore and the underworld may stop at the lost and re-discovered island to which all myths think there is only a river round where the snake may bite its own tail with purpose or with a chance swirl of spin, its loop by magic self sustained.

We are our own boatman who juggle the fox, the chicken, and the corn across the other side that with only two of them at a time and reversed some trips bring all home safe that one does not consume the other.  Yet, from his higher view he solves the puzzle and higher still his mindful vision sees two ways to choose which are the passengers.

Some of us live in this higher world of shells much greater than we have dreamed or with shifts of time dance in the world as if we are like the foxes heeding nature or subdued having lost so tell others to lose their tails.  At times but in the chicken's mood back and forth, changing sides just for the sake of moving endless random walking only to return to where we began until the lightning strikes blind creatures with their heads cut off. Then some are just the corn, so long to sprout and dream if then and if no crows consume them.

I have watched the boatman in his work along the river and when in the concrete desert of city streets and star obscuring lamps felt the buildings, echoes in their granite stone of messages lost to the wind or in holding patterns in crystal lattices that seem alive enough to climb, set tendrils in our trellises, scale, root, and crumble our ivy skyward walls.

I have come to what without its measure as magic anymore in the sunlit day so late an awakening, free as if in us all beyond scale and degree, even the lesser creatures sufficient to their short lives and memories time enough outside of time to find what seems a Spirit again.  I know more of the secret, the still half unknown of what we and the world are and can be.

We all rest who reach this unrestrained and justified optimism despite what scaffolding in the emptiness of intelligence or ignorance circumnavigates the held face of the moon far from its dark side.

Thus we ask of walls, shells of our mental universe, with a little more wisdom can pass thru them, even before the imagined beginning or tunnel thru that cave wall that we fancy holds the universe as much as we imagine ours is a limited and isolated realm of mind. I understand better the broken souls, their crust that shifts on mantles, membranes that mold their beating hearts of sparks and stems.

They feel in the way and wary of my all to human shelter that they heal fearing the vague deep source of naked light do deny the inevitable drift or crashing of life's continents and of such a gift of compassion born of love, love the substance there in depth by tragedy itself that there be longing, these lost souls sense but cannot truly believe.

Yet in the here and now as there and then how can they understand without their growing that the unexpected consequence of my dabbling alchemy of esoteric physics is that I see with compassion into their hearts so walk among them, share the water and the wine, net the fish, labor to sift for their gold dust pebbles in a dish.  Let us who hath ears and eyes forgive them for they knew not how much more than their earthly dreams they are and still will be.

These islands at the falling rapids, forks in the river, paths that fade slowly a dying species or half tossed away as nature her acorns and apples so replete for those that ripen as this old world keeps on and the source of light renewed. Or that if failed unto others so failed into themselves those that take or lie to what can be, save the narrow chains and parasites on each a universe yet more, thus self unforgiving.

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A short narrative for Open Link Monday although I considered posting a poem from my early teen years on this 50th anniversary of a significant moment in civil rights struggle I called  "Who Are the Damned in Birmingham"  I may link to that page as it is on the web somewhere...

Her Twin Towers in Fantasy Land

L. Edgar Otto    11 September, 2013

Miley
Cyrus
catching
Virus
Wrecking
Ball
Clamping
Legs

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for the imaginary garden with real toads community

Fireblossom (whose picture for this evoked an opposite of maiden and fishy parts) and Margarets (Not to mension also a Fibonacci minimal 112 112 form) Eight Words very good... I don't feel a kiss will give the sealing in me a soul or tell me I am beautiful...Live long enough and the metaphors make new memories and new metaphors... slow connection so this is too much like homework to respond all the time to all of you... eight words, who says we don't like haiku?  Well, I liked the song but the video was so contrived.  So forgive my contribution today, it is an endless lazy eight.

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