There is a dark, hooded sadness,

Crouched at the bottom of my soul,

Waiting with bitter patience.

He does not howl or scream,

But he makes his presence known with an incessant maundering ring -

Like hollow chimes in the swirling winter wind.

He does not touch me or speak to me,

But he follows at my heels with the persistence of a shadow

And then pools around my feet-

Like the wax that holds a melting candle to its ground.

The ocean holds the broken moon

From the plane,

The clouds are not the innocent bunnies and puppies

         that they appear to be from the ground.

From this close we see their true nature.

The clouds are not the amorphous, intangible mists that we deem them.

No longer delicate, fluffy and windblown.

From the plane, the clouds form the eerie landscape

         of a desolate, snowy planet.

They are not pushed by gentle breezes,

but are eroded by the winds into buttes, canyons and caves.

And the wispy clouds that pass over these white plains and floating mountains,

are great, ferocious beasts - anti-gravity dinosaurs, of sorts.

Sailing and swimming in their weightlessness,

These fluffy giants swallow up our tiny jet,

And we feel the rumbling as the beasts chew us up.

Intoxicated with giggles, we stumble over nothing,

Untroubled by our audience of others.

We don’t recall the joke, and we don’t care what it was

Because laughter feels a lot like love.

Tripping up the stairs, are three intertwining pairs

Of floundering, doddering legs.

We’ve smiled our faces to their maximum width,

And we can hardly keep our feet below our knees.

So we braid our arms around each other’s waists

And topple forward as a group, like a sloshing bowl of soup

‘Til we spill out on the lawn, in a crashing, splashing heap

And we laugh ourselves to silence on the ground.

The summertime air is heavy; it rests on us - surrounds us.

But its weight is not oppressive; it is a comforting embrace.

It is thick and we cannot walk through it, so we lay in the grass that no one will mow.

The air is so thick that sound cannot penetrate it, so we lie in silence

The air smells like sweat and suntan lotion...

There is no breeze so the wind chimes are dead.

Tonight the wind is crying so loudly that I mistook it for thunder.

The night sounds like a strange orchestra -

Tuning itself with its incessant whirling.

The trees are throwing their branches;

Trying to uproot themselves in hopes that they will run -

and escape this dissonant howling.

The sky is a muddled purple.

But the rain has stopped.

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