and now....
Opus 61
By W. Christopher Epler
the morning emerges from yesterday's resignations
and struggles to meet the day vertically and combed.
snowflakes of the night,
now melted into irrelevance,
no longer blind us with revelations
and the day awaits bipedal outpourings
onto the atmosphere floor.
a black comb in the boy's pocket
bulges slightly
and catches on drawers when he walks too close,
inconveniencing parent policed,
rushing to school trajectories,
but not defining his life into grandparent non futures
since relatives for him drop off the edge of the world
with no particular fanfare.
but grandparents remember still, occasionally,
snowstorms and kitchens of long ago schoolings:
scolding teachers, homework dungeons, and Christmas holidays
now lost beyond lostness,
lost beyond anticipation, commitment, or someone else's prayers
and exquisitely unimaginable to their own children's grudging paybacks.
these sighing epiphanies are flavored with tutored acceptance,
but never with smiles.
the boy’s school is a warehouse of cross talking pandemonium
in which taller and heavier life forms
perform pedagogical rituals which they never took seriously either
and the boy learns far more about what the grownups don't know
than what they, never convincingly,
claim to know with such absolute certainty.
this lesson requires no homework and is never forgotten.
the boy starts to breathe again
the moment he leaves these peculiar factories
and surrenders while walking home to a calling ancientness
which encourages him to bite off small branches overhanging the sidewalk
just for the animal hell of it.
he does so
and spits
and much prefers this jaw living
to the escaped again chalkboard comas.
in jungle summers he sometimes visits dry creek beds
slightly out of town,
memory innocent, adult less, and usually alone
exploring alternative realities
unimaginable to philosophers and businessmen.
breathing and eyes only remain
when merging into these insect glorias and heat saturated weeds,
antidote dimensions to the clutchings of language drunk adults
-- the dead eyed ones who think they're alive
but feed on the earth magic of children.
in early teens he bicycles to small rivers of privacy
into which he abandonly walks
otter nude and sun alive
and drifts beyond the consensus insanities of the world.
the mud moves between his toes
while currents embracing his utter body
propel him through adventures with logs, leaves,
even turtles, and pell mell turnings.
the sky is plane less, the sounds aren't man made.
he has come home.
in due course the booming advice guns
of head livers
penetrate his very castle,
there to echo unceasingly,
contemptuously ignored only by his loins
which remain invincibly memory proof.
the open winged,
sky eyed living of boyhood
shrinks to a bubble of jabber
claiming to be a soul,
an ache of lost wildness
which breaks the hearts of angels.
oh, young boy, young man,
how right you were about everything,
everything,
and everything.
Peace y'all
