Nathaniel T. Hughes

Start now by  saying grace, waking up awaking sounds: sun on pillow, sun in heart, sun in all you do from here on out.

Pacific time eagerly chasing me; old westerly ways battling barefoot, a stand-still eastern jive. So, here's to unconvincing June gloom, creeping chilly night fog, and all of its electrical line tunes - the Santa Anna winds on empty Canerry Row streets, smells of ocean and sounds of seals, all the promises I forget I made. I still miss foggy nights and a chilled-red face, but I can't stop this traveling; I'm overly anxious, in an easterly way.

-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.