Linda Shelley Was Found Dead Last Sunday

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Ron Crete
Hamilton, Montana

The body of Linda Shelley was found Sunday by a man out walking.  She had huddled down in a dense clump of willows behind a local grocery store only a block from a 24-hour convenience store.  In fact, in an area I run Tess and many others walk or run their dogs as well.  Any of us could have found her.  Some of her friends and other compassionate persons who knew her had helped her pay some of her monthly bills, rent, etc., but for some reason Linda went for her last walk last Saturday night or a night or two before that and her body gave in to hypothermia as she nested in that harbor of willows.

I followed the story for a few days.  Watched the line or two given to her unusual death on Missoula television and felt the entire community waking up to the simple fact some people go homeless in our backyards and for some human reason cannot be helped out of their solitude or aloneness, preferring to pass up any more of the same life they have been experiencing for too long.  Of course maybe there was a "blip" in her brain that turned off her normal survival instincts and she didn't know what she was doing.  I'm going with the previous conjecture until the police tell us more.  For now, Linda Shelley is dead.

There seems to be a mood that settles over a small town like Hamilton when such, almost paranormal, bad things happen like Linda Shelley's death.  First, there seems to be a rash of odd crimes that show up.  One just now getting court time is a death by a stomp in the belly apparently by a friend or acquaintance who didn't like something the dead guy said about the accused girlfriends hair or some such nonsense.  A political story of an appointed official is another quirk of fate that has our town humming.  A woman who was supposed to be accounting for the county (i.e., County Treasurer, appointee) seems to have missed the opportunity to make the numbers work in a timely manner.  How many numbers can a county 25,000 or so people have to contend with.  Then, a winter settles into Hamilton that might be quite normal on a scale of 100 years, but it happens at a time when there is much acrimony in the community mind about things just generally being a little on the "whacked" side of customary life.  Like I said, a "rash" of misfortune seems to be tripping a wire that causes a chain of actions like a Rube Goldberg contraption and the little burg of Hamilton is in a tizzy.

There is an emotional haze that hovers over our little town right now too.  I'm a poet.  I can feel it.  Does anyone else sense that our normal rotation is a bit out of alignment with Highway 93 where it crosses Main Street?  You know what I mean.  People are thinking about these occurrences they are not used to spending time mentally processing.  It's not as strong as you would feel if the world had warmed up a whole degree on average in a day, but it's the kind of "pulse check" a community doesn't take very often.  We are in the middle of a community mentally checking it's vital signs.  And, to be honest, I sense there is probably much talk over coffee about it going on too.  Maybe, just maybe, we are taking a time-out.  We have gone to our perspective corners and like children gone off the acceptable line of behavior, we Hamilton adults are rechecking our math seeking answers to a few too many things we don't usually pay any attention to.

So, that sense pushed a poem out of me yesterday and I tried to send it to the Ravalli Republic to publish on the Op Ed Page.  They can't publish poems because they can't verify "authorship".  Now that seems to me to be a chink in the armor of reality in itself and a further indication that our world of rapid and mass media is gone a bit out of tune with community conversation.  I emailed it to them.  I would have hand carried it to them and signed the damn thing if they said they had a protocol for such.  No matter.  I'm happy just blogging it today and letting Linda Shelley rest in peace.

Pax Nabisco.

______________________________

Ode to Linda Shelley  (1953-2014)

I did not know you.
You have some fame now
Though, and some who still care
Grieve through your strange tragic passing.

We want to know why
You chose the cave
Of willows to hold you
As you passed into deep sleep--

Timelessness-- while we linger
Wondering of your courage.
Were your thoughts so far
From us, your town, more perfect

Than any words of hope or comfort
We offered you in this life? Could
We have been a shelter
That kept you with us a while longer?

You did not take much from us
As you wandered in and out
Of a few lives asking little;
Even durable company, not.

I wonder, were you seeking comfort there?
I know willows and they say
They forever bend to save themselves
From wind or the freezing cold of winter.

Sleep well then, now in your chosen place.
Let us wonder where we did not hear your
Calling out, or see you turning in for the long night.
There, where the wisp of the willow coddled you.

We have now thought deeply of your life.
Cannot imagine it for ourselves.
Yet your inclination to let Nature
Take you in ought to warm us as an ending.

The Garden Gate

The Garden Gate

Children ride the garden gate

Not aware it might unhinge.

That chore of worry is for watchful parents

Standing somewhat crooked

Back-pressed by a gloved hand-heel

In the bountiful row of red tomatoes.

The garden work of children simply

The squealed glee of childhood.

Innocence experimenting with the squinching

Rusted hinge calling all able hands

To Summer’s sweet whiffs

Musky soil harrowed around

The tempting fruits of waning daylight.

Within each gardener

A sense of reward for daily toil

Far from the pleasured memories

Those layering childhood lessons

Stamped in the blossoming minds

To be carried long as remembered times.

The baskets of vegetables,

Those wide brimmed wire-handled, leg-spreading

Heavy, back heaving woven carriers
Filled with color;

Red, green, or orange,

And textures;

Hairy, prickly, or smooth and of scents

Sour, sweet, acrid or erotic.

No child of a gardener goddess

Forgets those pussy-willow soft years

Leading up to gardening as “dirty” teenage chore.

Each sensation of a grandmother’s garden

Is stored and binds family as one life.

A place where shredded, sliced and diced

Offerings are tasted and liked or “patooeed”;

When family dinners exhaust words muttered mouthed-full,

And family rituals, no matter how seldom

Shared, are felt as certainty and pride of relatedness.

With time the gate hinge opens

Others go in and out

Creating their own world

Trying new angles of light, water and seeded soil.

Children walk off to school, then fly

Driving away from graduation,

Shedding rice after sworn vows,

Bearing children and someday too,

Fixing the gate and tilling  good soil.

Then once upon a day

A life nears closing time.

 The elder assumed family journalist

The one always outside the pictured

Rituals that make family a house-hold

Is stricken and changed.  Her body turns on her mind.

Where once she stood erect and watchful,

Where measured stride was effortlessly fluid and wild,

Where yard-sticked new ones  measured inches of pride.

And  too, those children now parents

Still offered hard earned confidence

A salve on a world of impossible sprains

For those parents of children growing to soon wise.

No longer bent above the rows,

Unable to hoist the wire-handled harvest to wagon

She stands by, unable to wildly swing the hammock held child.

Somehow the new squealers seem more joyful

To the greying grandmother.

And time offers no reward for a life pressed hard

Against decades of twisted and turned

Cucumber vines of career journeys--

A new set of children dirtied in new-turned rows

Their houses now in towns

More rooms but less dirt for the growing plot.

Places where no gate harbors the harvest

For the new faces and voices.

Then, a gift is offered.

And a life becomes memories of that specially rolled crust--

The perfect golden custard squash pie;

A measured life goes beyond prime fruitfulness.

Courage enlightens through an unpredictable

Fractured future to become wisdom gifted. 

At last, she is released from knowing when to let

The tortured body’s clock unwind, when to leave

The chase in the biological accounts of young stout hearts.

When do we let the land have its way with us?

When will it take back its fuel for its perpetual renewal?

Maybe after hearing one last time, “Close the gate,”

As though the sanctity of humanity needed secure latching.

She holds us now to a silent creed;

An ancient nurturing instinct, a dance

Ever so gently and gaily performed and taught.

Her grace spoken:

“Enter the garden lovingly.

Swing on the gate you little rascals. 

Sprout and continue my never-ending story.”

How Many Seconds in a Year?

Friends, Family and Countrymen:

A year.  That's what Valentine's Day signals for me now; another year.  It's more like New Years Day than a 'honey-bun' day.  Yet, in some ways it's still nice to be aware that couples are thinking deeply about the other, the soulmate, the wife, the hubby and doing something a little out of the ordinary or an oo-la-la-lot out of the ordinary.  To those of you supposedly in love who are passing up your daily or once a year chance to indulge yourselves in what it means to be "in love" go out and get yourself spanked, hard and long, you idiots.  If you're inclined to let bullshit get in the way of that little bit of time you get on this planet with someone at least remotely compatible with your needs and your offerings, I can only lower my head and want to kick dirt on your shoes for making such a bad call on a "fastball right down the pipe".

To those of you offering me so much time to walk along and console me I'm feeling loved and I've learned from you.  In this year, together, or with me out a wandering alone, time has been by biggest companion.  Lots of it.  A year after a death as personal as Lyn's was to me (more so to her of course) time's pace was as much of the pain as the achy-breaky heart syndrome I worked to overcome.  A year is a lot of seconds.  And I feel I counted each one as something remembered, felt or imagined coming into that moment and taunting me into considering it; wanted to or not.  I feel I lived that entire year more so than all the other 64 years of my, starting to smell like an old person, life.  Something about the "replacement" exercises of that aloneness I've written or talked to you about--that "object" word that is really a verb, "replacing".  It is where a "re-placing of time as it stands still beside and inside.  And it is immovable until it is a noun, "replacement".  Then you can hop over it or jump around whatever it is.  Mostly though I want to say thank you for being with me all year and continuing on if you can (I ought to be able to pay you back somehow in time).  I know, I just said it was so very long, but it's intensity taught me much about dealing with the time I have left. 

I must tell you I have no idea what the meaning of life or death is after this year.  It makes so sense to me either way.  What an outcome.  You head into grieving believing you're going to come out the other side (or not caring if you do or not) and once passing through you suspect your gain will be insight into the "Why Me?", "What is the point of it all", "Oh, I get it" questions all answered up and neatly packed into your backpack and ready for the next walk or stroll through Life's Park.  Nope.  Not a clue.  Clueless, is a better or best term I can come up with.  I think this outcome shortens my life in many ways.  It was so much fun ignoring the lack of aim of a life for 64 years that I actually just became "me" and learned about "others" and fa la la la la, la la la laa'd into the comma my brain wants me to be in.  It's like the Kroll's Cafe commercials in Fargo where two German crones come on TV to tell about their cafe, those silver bullet diners and their catch phrase is, "Shut up and Eat?".  Damn!!  That's about it for me now.  A year digging into the soul of my soul and I come out completely uncertain about almost everything I felt some certainty toward before.  You know like "truth".  Pretty stable idea in life for most, but "truth" is on a string and it swings like an old hanging bridge over an ancient forest's river artery.  What a great invention our brains.  And to head into today and beyond realizing it's best advice and clearest message is going to be, "Shut up and eat!"  It's enough I'm sure, to send many folks off looking for the answer in a bible or from the flapping jaws of da preacher man. 

I'm different without her.  Also, my mom and dad, David's wife Jane, Lyn's brother Lewis, all dying during that time Lyn and I spent walking around her death messenger on the farm have affected my psyche in the sense that I hardly realized they were dying right before my very eyes, while all the time I could only see Lyn and be steady to aid her if she ever called out.  Those almost seven years of tending to her cancer beast and her needs took her away from me one day at a time until she reached a point about five years in where we started to become separate in our thoughts and deeds of living as farmers.  She made time then, once my parents were secured in their vaults in hallowed ground, Jane too, to think about her life and her kids and their kids and our time together as the package of her life.  It absorbed her somewhat more than I expected.  I had imagined that there would be great chats about "life" and the "pursuit of happiness", but that was not Lyn's style.  "Let it be" was Lyn's style and she worked at farming while her mind worked at letting go of her ailing body, that cancer that was chewing on her like a dog trying to chew up an entire elk carcass alongside the highway.  We didn't grow apart, really.  We didn't fall out of love.  Intimacy was pretty damn sweet.  But, she was leaving me way back when and I was walking a thin line of life without her back as far back as 2011, just after dad died, as if she had met her last obligation to the family that adopted her unconditionally.  It's a torture I will not recommend, but I know so many others have lived it and know more about its feel and effect than I can describe in these paragraphs.  Some others in my family, like Carol, lost husband and child in one fell swoop of the grim reapers sickle and my feelings are real for that, but distracted as I worked with Lyn to enjoy every last moment of her last wish to nurture a little farm and all it's living things.  That's who she was all her life, Nature's handmaid.

I wrote a poem last night thinking of Lyn and its what it is and will probably find this post tomorrow as I look at it again today and remember what it is the poem was trying to say.  Why it seemed to have to come out and get some fresh air.  You know, what poems tend to do; show up, mostly not to be read by many or even a few, but just to be out in the light for their time.  Like the lives we live; just a little sunshine goes a long way in a life.  I think that is all I have to say for now about this right of passage I'd gladly take out of life's formula if I were in charge.  And, I'd also try to leave more bread crumbs along the pathways of my fellow beasts so the pointlessness of it all; life and death, would not have to be so painful.

Why?

The Civil Wars Reincarnated

One day God was out walking around Telegraph Hill in San Francisco feeling kind of bored.  He was glassing the parrots with his Zeiss binoculars and thinking about the time when Adam and Eve screwed up.  No, he was lamenting that day more than thinking about it.  He sat on a park bench for a minute even though he didn't need a park bench or anything to sit on, but he was feeling the effects of living a chunk of eternity without Adam and Eve in the Garden.  Many people walked by him and it somehow made him feel even more different inside of Eternity than ever:  Kind of a warm rushing flushed feeling he hadn't really felt before.  What he had noticed over the eons was that Man had pretty much continued to screw things up.  They had continued to screw up and down sometimes too.  It seemed like there was no end to the people walking by his bench-perch (God was still thinking about the parrots I guess).

God kept thinking about all the screw ups, mostly all the wars humans had preoccupied themselves with.  All the killing of his creations that happened during wars like the Trojan Wars, and the 100 Days War, the Civil War (God! that was a real screw up he thought), then WWI and WWII and Vietnam.  He was getting woozy thinking of all the killing and mess man had gotten himself into after the Garden.  Then one of the parrots landed next to him on the bench.  God had been thinking he had thought enough about all the turmoil man had created for himself with the free will he let them take out of the Garden that time after the apple bobbing screw up.  War he decided was the worst of Man's inventions, God thought (to himself of course).  Where the hell did man come up with this idea of war?  God knew he had invented love making for humans after the first screw up so they could go forth and prosper and continue to screw up, but war seemed like a sin against love making.  So, God was thinking about that when he looked back at the parrot.  He noticed the parrot was wearing a set of headphones and seems to be tapping his foot and kind of rocking back and forth to the sound coming through the headphones.

The parrot peeled off the headphones and offered them to God.  So, God took them and pretended he had a head and pretended he didn't know what the parrot was listening to even though he knew music because he let man invent that too.  God was sick of inventing after those six hard days at the grinding wheel and was enjoying man making all kinds of things on his own.

So the parrot watched God put on the headphones and the parrot flew off to hang out with and copulate with his mate up in the trees on Telegraph Hill.  God starting focusing on the music in the headphones and smiled.  He hadn't really listened to music much before.  He had been too busy paying attention to everything at once and so he didn't really know much about any one thing in particular.  He didn't figure that was his job after setting the whole Universe spinning.  God was listening and thinking about how cool it would be if he could get all of mankind to just take a break like he was and listen to some music.  He thought about the time, a few hours back in eternity when he watched Adam and Eve listening to the sounds of their new home outside of Paradise.  He remembered the great music that Mozart and the boys produced during their time.  Then he started thinking about the not too long ago when some guys called the Everly Brothers were singing their great duets.  Then some more wars came and all of a sudden there was all kinds of new music that couples like Adam and Eve were listening to all kinds of great rock and roll and slow dancing music and they were making love too and having babies and man just kept on going.

God was getting a little nostalgic through all of this and decided it seemed man had done a couple things right after all.  Music being one of them and maybe that is what kept man and woman doing what they were supposed to do.  He was just thinking about all this when he started to listen to the music in the headphones again.  He liked what was playing.  He thought about how every generation of humans had their favorite music and that once or sometime twice in every generation since man invented music there was a duet that was really top notch.  He did some calculations and figured out that music and math were the same thing, but music made babies and math made the world go around.
  
He started listening to the music again.  He really listened and he felt his alone-ness changing to loneliness  He decided that being the one and only God wasn't all that it was cracked up to be.  All because of taking the time to listen to this specific duet singing through his headphones.  God started swaying back and forth to the songs and the chords and the harmonies and the sense of the love that was coming to him through the music.  YES, he thought to himself, this is what I invented, love, and man has figured out how to induce love with music.  God was all smiles, but at the same time he was getting all the more lonely.  Then when he was at the height of a very (almost) overpowering feeling inside his unversal self the last song ended and an announcer came on and said; "That last song was, "Dance with Me Until the End of Love" by The Civil Wars.  And that made God so warm and fuzzy inside he wanted to fly up in the trees with the parrots, find a mate and make love.  He was beside himself with this new feeling he now could feel was love.  He realized  maybe man had figured out that war was evil and love was good.  And then, God decided it was a good day to rest again.  As he leaned back into the park bench comfortable with himself and the bench, He thought seriously about letting Man back into the Garden.

Once Upon A Desert Dream

Desert Dreaming

I dreamed I went to the desert. 

Not to see Jesus,

Not to be torched by sunlight

Or to walk on the burning scorched waterless sand.

Specialists of creation arrived ahead of me.

And like me, when the sun gave up

I no longer felt alone

I was joined in rapidly cooling darkness

By strange creatures moving,

Listening, buzzing, calling wildly.  All invisible

To my desert blindness.  My fearful voice,

A kind of feigned wailing did not seem to detour

Those non-aliens so adapted to that place and

Time tested to survive where I was not.

I must have had a dream purpose for being there. 

Surely to dream through the experience,

But more to observe adaptation of the resident's

Resultant consequences of their being there without humans

For eons and going through the motions of survival.

The sand was too hot for my feet.

The plants too course for my touch.

Some animals were venomous,

Biting things and others

Lived in husk-like hide-wear.

(Try to bio-mimic those outfits for humans)

All these ‘others’ seemed evasive;

Built for speed, cryptically colored, efficient.

I was in their place to learn or perish.

I was not honed for the comfortless desert.

There were no “wheat bellies” to be found.

And as observer I was observed.

When quick enough to glimpse their forms

I did not spoil their networking.

I felt as if in a play titled, “Observer observed.” 

What I could not see, they seemed to have noticed.

While I struggled to find shade

From the kiln-sun-fire

They slithered into crevasses.

I felt like there was no room at the inn.

My dream search, night or day, was for lost myths.

Stories of my youth about the “mother-lodes”

Told by others who had once found it

Having come to the desert

As a mysterious place holding untold treasures

Prospectors prospecting,

And they tried and they died,

Trying to report finding “it”.

Many learned tongue-thickened silence.

Some found ‘the lode’ and lived to tell of it.

Then, ironically, died trying to retrace their

Duned-over or forgotten landmarks.

I did not go dreaming in the desert for gold,

But for the salve of alternative solitude.

And when the dry night air showed me eternity,

When I reached up to touch the just out of reach stars

(So deceptive the clear night desert unbleached by sunlight) 

I sensed my mind as desert;

How it could go on beyond me, outlast this man.

And too, how the desert persists,

Howls in our absence,

(Like a mythical wolf cheering it doesn’t live on the moon)

Makes fun of our technology

Takes our lives so we won’t rot elsewhere unconsumed.

Deserted, I pondered the burial rituals

Of those ancient Egyptian desert-Nile people.

Their Embalming and companion treasures entombed.

Their myths allowed them to travel beyond the desert in death.

Their art and useful creations at hand entering eternity

Lest they be reborn in a Nile-less desert future.

Long before my desert journey

They worshiped sun and water,

Could not persist without it.

Oh, the patience of ancestors

Entombed in block-stone pyramids

Their sacred myths

Kept alive by the kin waiting,

Watching and wondering.

When human ignorance of long ago

Turned Eden to sun baked sand

Man’s ineptness was revealed

In a life-form we now call desert.

Those generations of desert peoples

Created a pitiless God out of a torturous sun.

An unchanging God until Man re-minded himself after It.

Awake now--writing this narrative poem

I know we cannot change fast enough,

To go wandering the desert as our permanent home.

Adapt or die.

I killed my desert dream. 

Like the storied myths of desert visions

Other desert wanderers and seers perished or

Crawled out and told of unbelievable things. 

Humbled by their inability to sustain a desert life

By way of these myths, I am keenly aware 

Of riparian- and savanna-man’s limitations.

Home again in Montana and the lush system of not-desert

I find common fellows who are more like me

Then any others anywhere I've been on earth--Americans.

And what I share with them is more than Man’s

Frailties, strengths and emotions.

The same magic seen in the desert beasts I dreamed;

(Skills to survive in place, places that make us all different)

I too am a magical animal; one of waters and less angled sun,

Of trees and soils filled with nourishing wetted life.

A place where rocks, drought and exposure

Challenge me to re-create myself

Joyfully while skillfully testing death.

Wild elements and situations foreign to domestic life

Renew me, send me back ‘home’ bravely pushing against time.

Time and chance create change--

A useful tool, often taken for granted, more often scorned.

We have short memory of places hostile to our well-being.

We remember homes where we loved and co-mingled.

Homes filled with lessons of courage to continue

And games of reasoning and love to sharpen

Against time our amazingly adaptive man-code.

A unique code passed through kinship to ward

Off ever-changing risks to our being

Human.

Seeking Council with Muse Artemis

Seeking Council with Muse Artemis

  

Will you come to me now, Artemis,

Out of  your dark obedient forest?

There, where you are content and powerful.

My view of these piney Bitterroots

Are frightfully bold for this mortal’s eyes.

You take advantage of hills

As if they were scattered stones

For your playful fashioning of gigantic cairns.

My River has a frozen sheet over it again.

It’s heat released high into the canyons.

Frosted air crystals flit about wind-torn.

They shimmer, daylight rainbowing them.

Winter sleeps under white snow-covered ground.

I wait for a full spring moon

Not ringed mysteriously like this February one.

I feel anxious for summer already.

My hunger for food is satisfied.

Aloneness sits close by,

Watching.

It is not a time to hunt, as you are known to do.

I too hunt alone.

You could be guiding me, mythical Huntress.

My hunting dog knows you Artemis.

She doesn’t “speak” of you, but knows your

Presence when running ahead of me.

She hunts for you and that is why she runs.

I too, was once a hunter like you.

I notched arrows like you.

I killed and said grace over the meat.

Though I want to be present

I am past too.

And future is drawing options

Of landscapes for me to imagine.

You, Muse, sit silent somewhere

Wildland surrounds you securely--

Unassuming , coy Goddess.

Are you upset with this mortal?

He only tries his writing to learn.

I do not write to take down

The holy or well meaning.

My words must be too vague

They stumble over things looking for

Universals that might please you.

I cannot climb the mount

To your world--so unlike mine

So unknowable and immortal like your siblings.

My life is of a definite time

A time-aged and disfigured life.

Unlike you, I cannot watch and wait musing.

Nor play roulette with hope?

Hope is too mundane, too captive for this mortal.

What do I call the anticipation I feel?

Tell me the words.  I’ll put them down here.

Ought I not imagine an expected pleasure?

No!  It need not be “desire”. 

That would over-power me now.

What is pleasure experienced in the silence of aloneness?

Do I want or need simple conversation to be a-mused like you?

I’ll gladly take conversation;

If the ending is resolution,

Agreeing to terms of endearment

Is more than enough, Muse.

Does this aging mortal have to be slain

Upon your alter on Olympus?

Offered up as sacrifice for offenses?

Show me how to get there and I’ll come.

What if I run away?  I am afraid.

Yet, if I could run away

My every ounce would circle back seeking answers.

I have grown old and understanding

Of my time waiting alone these many days.

You can afford your Olympian pursuits ageless Goddess.

I expect your silence, your anger, and some frustrations

With mortal men such as I.  We earn them.

I am willing and able to cast away from Life’s shoreline.

I’ll go into exile on my windless Odyssey if you will it.

It might be a cure for my lost mate.

Our contract now finished, my psyche

No longer tempered by being alone,

No longer afraid knowing aloneness so well.

  

Courage seems so far away so unneeded by a Goddess.

I ponder manly work and succeed in doing it.

Yet, it feels like function without form.

Going through motions to feel alive.

Is not the circular life of a mortal

Labor for Death’s conclusion?

When guided by you Artemis,

The folly and foils of life

Seem joyful lessons to me;

This mortal among other survivors

Some more fit than I attracting

Your attentiveness.

I have aged beyond being durable

That is outside my resilience now.

Once a hardy youth

Being insignificant is not troubling now.

Existence without purpose  

Has become an expected impression of reality.

Should I throw in my will-towel

Accept assistance of community

In essence, ride with death nearing non-existence?

Have I done enough in this long time of living well?

Do I accept another free ride on life having known fulfillment?

Or while easing into conversations with Death  

Relax resistance to Its ever-present workings?

Or push against Death’s daily wager

Linger somewhat longer

Before conceding to Earth’s recycling,

Before giving back this fully nourished body,

Porter of my tingling soul-mind?

 This year, I seem to be atoning in a Purgatory,

A place or myth conflicting with personal common sense.

Show me a place-word that describes

Suffering for atonement on Earth , Artemis.

A word, my muse, of use in the life I now live.

I will accept these human penances concretely

If they are needed for another loved life.

I write loudly, my muse, alive in a body

Saturated with senses and thumbing through thoughts

Casting symbols in ink upon pages--

Lines for my last act and final scene.

Tell me Artemis:  What do muses do?

Abandon some mortals for others equally frail?

Leave it to the last mortal to resolve life alone?

Oh, the variety of fellow souls

The freely wandering bipeds

Confused by the mess man is in.

Mankind too frayed to mend in all it’s time thus far.

Were you there when we came down from the tree of life?

Were you entertained by our folly?

Am I to start anew;  begin again?

Searching.  Endlessly searching.

Is there no fable or moral you can lend

To aid my wanderings through mind mazes

Sorting trial and error for a way in-out?

Or does life’s mirage split by sensual prisms

Shine through always tattered 

Life so bright and dark at once.

Will you encourage another chapter be written?

So my play; my comedy, my epic

Again ends as tragedy?

Ha!  The varied and divided colors flashing life-light.

Even the wayward moth can see better than I.

Some waves I just cannot sense,

Some light I cannot to be drawn to,

Some fire I cannot be consumed by

Though I feel that is what life is--

A slow burning against the bulb of perfect decoy light.

I seem now unable to choose,

Maybe I am that light blinded moth-life.

Maybe all mortals are this way--the same beings,

Mindful, yet confused, 

Willed, always playing roulette with choices.

How then, do I course myself?  Flee on?

How do I feel powerful into the coming

From the present aloneness?

Oh, Muse of Moonlight, Night-wind of wildlands,

I feel wandering is man's ludicrous pathway.

I do not know the written symbol forming the scent of Completeness.

You, symbolic protector of all animals, are now guide absent.

You, always more than this thinking mortal man.

This man a ghost lost

In a village of strangers.

Come again.  Show me words to final Way,

And I will ink another moment of being

To this momentary page.