Stop!

Sighing is a time

That begins when the flexible

Soil opens and lets your weight disappear

Into some elastic womb of sheltering lullaby thoughts

And, like a bedtime story,

Your life between brackets is a mellifluous garden

You don’t want to leave.

Sensitive to the thousand sounds and inner sights

Of contemplation and comfort

That compensate for the loss of beautiful landscapes;

Protective and stretching to reach the blue,

Umbrella pines and soft winds, embracing bays and rhyming isles

Are gone, forever, but found in silent nights.

Hours are liquid and there is some hope

That at some point the relentless flow

Will stop to form a lake, a cradle of warmth

Against the non-space of an insipid mock-city…

Yes, it is a “dangerous” hope, taken as a medicine

While willingly ignoring its side effects

Of feeding the imaginary beauty

To push and push away the toxic stench

Of ever triumphant reality: the disease.

At night there is a movement in the air,

A life stronger than life, yet cowardly beaten,

The free dance of the soulful animal,

A gambol before the cruelest dawn.