There is the faintest sandalwood scent nestled in the valley just below your hairline, where the dried salt of summer sweat limns translucent peach fuzz with nearly imperceptible crystals.
This is a place that exists only in the minds of the maddest of men (and I am the maddest man)—where the days are all halcyon and there is no touch of grey on the horizon.
The light?
Rays of golden godfingers.
The leaves?
Crisp crimson paper.
The breeze?
Soft and cooling, soothing the verdant waves that lick the shoreline
Do you recall the good old days between our dreaming and waking
Walking together into a shared zone of no consequence
A friend zone, a lover zone, a liminal zone
Holding hands, holding breath, holding space, holding all the doors closed
Can you still hear them knocking, wanting in?
Everybody wants a piece of our action,
Especially when it’s not for them.
Can you please tell them to go away?
You’ve been here before, and you know the rules.
Curious and captivated, I venture too close to the waters
Where your candy-colored clowns and sandmen
Lurk lurid leering up at me from just below the surface
Tickling my ankles with spindly spider crab fingers
Catching and pulling me beneath your dreamtide
Down, down through blue-green halocline waters
The fresh water of recent memory
Floating chaste above the salt of shames long past remembering,
And the infinite borderland of the line between.
Down, down through deep cyan, aqua, Charleston green
Skobeloff green, robber fly eye green
A florid verdigris of forgetting and recalling…
Reaching back into the knowledge that I will always choose to drown in you
Rather than embrace the bends of surfacing.
Limitless cosmos, infinite space, this final frontier
I’m chanting a rope of hithlain numbers
Spinning psychological steel, strings of Theseus
To lay through these minotaur-infested caverns.
Which—despite the effort—I’ll never manage to navigate in reverse.
Entombed, I float; naked and vulnerable in this littoral space
No suit, no helmet, no deep sea breathing apparatus.
Clinging to crumbling bridges of the karst of consciousness
As all the while, the windmills of my mind drift into your midnight zone and collapse into themselves.
Further down the intense pressure coalesces our separate centers into one
Each upon each until we extend forever in all six directions.
Here, falcon and falconer are one and the same.
Here is our constant implosion, our endless submersion—
In its cold, inky silence, this secret will never slip its mooring.
Crabaghast! 