Thoughts: A Brooding Exploration

Photography by Ron Butler

These thoughts cannot be compressed
like someone’s dream car crushed into a small block
of scrap metal.
Recycled perhaps, but insignificant
in terms of retelling the love story
hopelessly festering
in its forgotten leather seams.

Impressions of your identity
are willingly abandoned
in the etches
of these thoughts,
whose questioning and dangerous
black cascades of wonder
are obliged
by your indulgence
in me,
like scars of ethereal light
staining the inside
of my eyelids.

Your happiness is the fresh beads
of dew on the grass
during my living cemetery’s
mid-mourning hours.

These thoughts are lost
Balloons rising up
to the sun, popping
one by one from the warmth
of your eyelashes.

You are something special in the chaos
of your surroundings;
an Alice or a Dorothy,
hopelessly hopeful
in following a single
blade of passion on a ceiling
fan of apathy ‘round and ‘round
with cool, dizzy eyes.

Radiant psychedelia filters
from your spirit
to mine like the photo
copying of a two-way mirror.

All that is burnt up and used
in my life becomes the Phoenix
of my soul; rekindling
fire from discarded
ashes obsessed within and without
my mind.

I am Ahab.

Our saga is some fairly tale read aloud
to an infant’s inner-ear
infection in a room blasted
with hydrophonic sound.

Your sovereign, severe sensitivity
chaperones me
to another place,
where nurses, shrinks, boozehounds and best
friends are inseparable.

Anything left to say is wrapped
snug in some warm blanket
chasm with these thoughts…