The tender moon 
                with her stolen light
goes crawling over the hills, laughing
in the soft warmth of an April evening.
You could hear the radio drifting
strange notes across the back yard; 
         a lazy semblance of the dance, 
         our strange tribal ritual,
         bodies touching, ravaged, entwined
         in the cotton sheets.

It flew strait and swift, like an arrow
above our yesterdays;
         the dark circumstance
         that left
                 in corners where mountains
and valleys meet,
         the alternating generations
         of love then hate, always with a clear mind,
         to create something new
         to give our children a holy grail
they’ll lose as we would.
Heed our loses as coming prophets
of disappearing thank-you’s that answer the night;
         the magic if
                  swelling like a storm fantasy
over the sea,
         persistence
                  that grew to rape the land,
         pushing onward
         over, under and down.
(I almost cut my ear off thinking about you yesterday 
while I was shaving.)
         Prowling over the back lots 
of summer, where youth gather
waiting for memories, smoking pot
and concurring the world.

He wrote his shadow plays there,
in the sun, and I acted them out before the moon
                    by a bonfire on the beach;
         a painting that was a real as a photograph
and read as an epitaph by our fathers;
history spitting itself out in screams

“The splendor, The urge”, there are no longer the trees
that once resided here;
         concrete and steel have eaten the fertile earth,
         swallowing it down with three shots of gin.
We walked into the living
world, where flowers wait to decay
and bloom 
          from fertile seeds;
          there roots struggle beneath our feet,
the pedals float down from the breeze
to the liquid highway of the stream.

Magic men create myths along the city walls,
where sadness rules and we now convene ;
burying deep our roots
of flesh that stretch toward the sun,
conducting our ceremonies between dawn