Convocation of Ghosts

Convocation of Ghosts

     We sit in dusty attic room. Midnight thoughts float like motes in young minds adrift in uncharted seas. Words dangle dreamily. Syllables slyly sail on oceanic odysseys. Our mentor takes the rudder and steers us around rocks in storm tossed seas. The tempest of our heresies takes us closer to ice bergs. We cross the Arctic Circle where anchorage is naught. We retreat to the lifeboats of certainty as our ship capsizes into anarchy.
     Ed’s older brother Randy navigates our boat by astrolabe into a realm where fantasy and reality merge. There we make landfall on an island of rationality. We laugh and joke on the brink of extinction. But tomorrow is still a shore beyond our sight. For now we’ll drink ale and celebrate a youth which is already slipping into the abyss.  
     Randy vanishes into the hallway. Ed and me  play Dungeon’s and Dragons. Randy appears like an echo of the adult world. We shyly retreat from the board of fantasy. Randy says, “You know why you stopped when I came in. You were embarrassed to be playing that child’s game.”
     We resume our symposium on a real world looming like a mountain ready to avalanche. We enter the forest of Buddhism where peace reigns but for the tiger hiding in the woods. But the tiger roams over the hill. He has eaten his fill for this evening.  
     Plato’s books molder on shelves forgotten in time in Victorian house haunts. Gloaming ghosts gather like ravens. Perched in cubby holes they gaze dolefully at prodigal sons.
     Seconds seep into waters of Lethe. Moments meander like the river and follow the channel of idealism. We dig deep into mud of ages to summon ancient sages.  Our chattering childhood nears curtain call as we bow into oblivion and scatter like Black Birds into the waiting wind.