Nathaniel T. Hughes

-Not to sound trite...  But I miss you. It has been like three life times and another summer is passing, another life being written, in-between  mountains and city buildings.

Through the vicissitudes, I go onward from here, full-bright-moon-night tugging at smiling ebbs of life: Yes, I must be fine.

There's mystic trees in these backyards, flagstone walls falling down  - page markers,          testaments               and doctrinal proposals to lone farm wheels, its bygones, rusty allegiances and a separate-time's debilitation - the                       barbed-wire traps,                          all-along    the             dividing             lines as a unitedly old,  wild  cherry  incessantly over-turns names and carvings; - a place  where we might have  met and             retreated from, oh                 it was so many kalpas  ago. yet if you would           o n l y   ...

trees have stripped naked again, scandalous bark like hard nipples; seeing for miles: there's no where to go.

To study the multifarious strokes of southerly wind on bronzed, oily skin, to spend our time better, abiding in the in-between, noting the finite of infinite - the things right in front of our face, we fail to notice everyday, sitting in graying hues of black porous dirt, bathing in the shallow orange of ageing September rays; it's being spun like a cobwebbed earth, indiscriminately catching all the comes its way: Today, like all the rest, there's a mysterious twitch in the accelerating strings of time, river smells of midafternoon spewing off from the sputtering clouds; and a silence in its whitish stroke, finally slowing the hasty universe down; it's soothing, like wooden flute notes in our ears, a calming ripple through the gravity that holds us all in place. Get closer, and you'll see all amazing intricacies, the earth, just shifting over slightly, not even close to several degrees.

We departed dark basement gate 16 to Syracuse from the mess of New York's port authority terminal. All was silent as, everyone was OK with letting loquacious Jersey traffic do the talking for awhile. Yet, as we bumped and raged along, showing no mercy for potholes or lane-changing-horns, mouths began to move, and short words began to form. The sun was just scattered modes of light on the tired PA trees, when Jim from Jersey, sitting slightly behind and across the isle, began to talk to me. We quickly agreed that the Mayans were masters of the stars, kings of celestial bodies, resting in astronomical intricacies. We agreed that they weren't profits; and it was just by some sick twist of fate that the world is ending so close to such an infamous, arbitrary date. We agreed that life is crude and that, if we could, we'd make god fuck the asshole of the moon. And as the bus filled up with chatter, and weary sleepers waking up, we hit a dubious ...

Harking laughter and tiny voices across the street fill the air; as carefree free as they are, tomorrow isn't even a pebbled thought away. Here, there's only a slinking string of time and space, with crickets fighting for the darkest deva sound; it's in-betweens it all that there's a great... pause - the leaves forced upside down, the grasses waiting to be part of wilted vindication, and all the birds coming back from the edge of dangerous sleep deprivation. Yet one noise, transcends it all: a hissing, damning calm, saying: "It really shouldn't be that long now."