You must never forget the suspenders

The night came after the fateful event was over.  I stood tailored in rags gazing out the back glass.  There was a noisy fly that was beside himself; he could not get to what he saw on the outside – a world where I wished I was at; anyplace but here.

The fly was looking at the tulip tree through the glass as it wept in the misty evening – I heard him.  The band was magnificent.  The soldiers crossed the skies of arcadia as the children sang of events, only witnessed in the hearts that lay dying across the earth.   They are preparing for war; ready and willing, and so their spirits must be kept high in pirate ships.  They are glory in the making.  

As I prepared my lungs for victory, a woman wanted to pray for me and it tithed my brain to a longitude of forty west - my mind drifted to a sea.  I thought of Rudyard Kipling.  He wrote a story of a sailor eaten by a whale, and a Stute fish that was hidden under the Door-sills of the Equator.  I thought of his infinite-resource-and-sagacity, and a pair of blue canvas breeches.   I thought of IF, and how now because of him the whales could never eat children again.  

Free of clouds,
give  to the hour,
testing
testing
thank you,
is this latter the louder,
I bring no justice to practice
the first cross of harmony,
where the pig turns a whirlwind,
 
where there is absolute
reality, there is rarity,

yet there’s something left out,
but I sang it anyway,

and I carried it to its place,
that’s where it gets me,

We look at serial pain lurking in tubes, in gardens of giants of dreams made up time and time again to look different; the more it changes the more it stays the same.

Comforted as I lay drifting,
struggling my mind to let it rest;
I will get no justice
for the pain that I felt
when no one came.

I was drifting off as my mind went back to the beginning of the evening; over and over the beginning played, only to gasp at the snapped nerve within me, it woke me, only to remind me it was over as I was walking past the tulip tree in the misty evening and headed home.

The beautiful sea
is to dream a dream
of an immortal vapor
the moment you see,
the pain of a sailor
as he places the wings
of an albatross
on a feathery thing
of unspotted whiteness,

The beautiful sea
is to dream a dream
of the immortal vapor
that paints the sea,
the sea the sea
in a mariner’s creed
of infinite-resource-and-sagacity,
      
I was dreaming,
the quiet came,
and then I woke,

to be set free
to dream a dream  
of the imagined eternity,

The suspenders were left behind,
I did that on purpose, you see,

Or so it seemed.