This one is only partial due to the length of it, which is unusual for open form verse. It attempts to describe all what was not remembered or felt when I went to my first school of enlightenment.

STEPPING OUT The world is forever a daunting place for siblings without silver spoons. Author I Stepping out of my hometown in the air of another place I felt things touching my ears, my eyes, and my skin. As I looked around I see it affect some others here, the images like aberrations shinning out on their bodies at the time, or the many sounds coming all day by city things. They hold fast. We are surrounded by it as plating, and if by chance we look at each other, we know its floating by our skins. It is vibrant, not static. It is rigid, this coating over our being, so that it feeds on fear that feeds on youth and fear so fretful, there is more fright to come. as a beginner, yet as sibling too; my emotions new and growing, and shows as newly born a thing pausing between new and old; I can tell when we pass each other and float away as if they weren’t there: from here to there I knew not where but wanted to find more of me. We move on, as though dreaming in night darkness all around, our brief knowing turns to naught; and into nothing any hope most of us fading on into the going. All goes on as though illusion some bright orbs in the ahead some of us going on still. Further, to unknown stages leaving just those behind a likeness stunning, to haunt, to alarm, and bump aside. The ones ahead couldn’t show themselves. In a manner of meanings it seemed a game of words that not seeing became the usual when everywhere around me I couldn’t hear the talking what was said high above poverty places I couldn’t name nothing in me could blend nothing in me could understand. The mystic journey goes on nothing stops going still. II In all my mind’s-thought – weight coming on with unbelievable tremor. I sped over the California state-line looking west thinking forward two years off route 66 up to the limits of Los Angeles that turned to something unthinkable and rock-hard the city when it lights up and put there parting when it revives to up-and-comers or interlopers beyond the last intersection, where I made my first stop the last morning light still clung to the road I changed with them inward, toward the paved heart of the city for I knew that school would be there waiting....