The glow, the light, the sun, the dawn, the moment, the fire, the reason, the hope, the sky, the waking, the dream… is over. Muscles gently tightened over the course of the night my body lay in a river in the silt breathing weeds and sighing carbon images of blue ammonites and trilobites and transitional fossil fish-birds, the waking stretch is wracked with cool shivers breaking against the warmth of the folding blankets in briny electricity crackling in slow motion across the perimeter of my curving body. I have hidden the bones inside me, made an architecture of them which I call “man”, all of a piece with the geology of sleep-waking, the secret topology of history. And there is a story inside the Wunderkammer found half-buried in the sand and soil on the shore among the saw grass; exposed, first scene: Joe Cornell’s calcareous fibula, tibia, talus and calcaneus, arranged as a bird’s legs walking across the ashen black static of a schoolhouse tabula rasa; the feathers of doves and peacocks, vultures and osprey; a backdrop by Yves Tanguy. The furniture of the future.

Here is a secret no-one will tell you. Do you see?

Eyes blear in surreptitious attempts at focusing on fingers unfurling against the grain of the immediate air. Knuckles ache like cats’ mewling milk hunger the color of cartilaginous joints. And here it can be said that the perception of it is in fact found foundering in the flat red-brown muscles pulling taut against tenterhooks in the midst of a remembered orgasm, weaving back and forth before the looming realization like a thunderstruck ape, hewing to the threads of this Perseus’ web in a founders effect, vaguely amazed to be alive — let alone like this. And how is it I am not deformed into something more beautiful to answer the hue and cry of the lace polished day with its horse latitudes and tropical years? The hair on my skin brushes whole Japanese rock gardens into Tibetan oblivions. I no longer know what I am thinking. Thinking, I know longer no what I am. I just am.

This is not what makes me afraid. The taste of dying is not that of Death’s licorice ropes, not even the lemon grass of Kuan Yin’s steaming wok. The taste of dying is life itself. This is not what makes me afraid. I am not afraid of nothing. Buried here beneath the sheets and blankets and comforter and heady air is love itself, still sleeping. Every new day that comes is finally illuminated by this moment. Cocking my head birdlike inquisitive a hand, half-hesitant, extends up the river of time like a quiet storm front sweeping seasons along in its wake as it moves to intimately touch eternity while eternity sleeps yet, gently undulating blood-warm and self-contained even as it broadcasts its radiation to the stars that don’t feel it. And in the slow well-oiled roll of waters down thru the landscapes of these endless possibilities is found all the raw material of life’s intention, invention, floral and faunal, mineral and physical creation. Mind. Perception. The glow. The shadow. The light. The dark. The sun. The void. The dawn. The moment. The fire. The journey. The reason. The madness. The hope. The sky. The waking. The gloaming. The celestial ever. The question. The answer. The dream…