Your four favorite persons,
Waist deep in a waveless ocean,
A gesturing-big, sticky-skin, messy-hair affair.
You run back to grab your camera,
Carrying it carefully over the water,
But when you look out again, they're lost in the night brown,
The sun is down and the flies are out.
You're practical as the daytime.
You never believed in the evening ghost crab,
Countering flashlights with a 360 view.
Ticking down to the land of the skim board,
Evolutionally stuck at the half point.
Wick the bubbling oxygen. Pinch the groping hand.
Hold your breath in the sand.
You're waking up on a jungly mattress,
Caterpillar tents in your branches.
You think you saw it. You think you caught a glimpse.
But here you are again at the bottom,
Climbing up yesterday's mountain.
All you really want is another little look off the edge.
You're just a few miles from your childhood exit,
A few more from the local prison.
Stop in for a visit, see what we've added on.
You press the button for the floor beneath the basement
To see the rows of lifers adjacent.
Each house was made by the man inside before he died
With the gold he could mine.
You come home in a blue afternoon,
Pick up the same tea and barbecue.
You've got so much, so much, and so little to do.
But your four favorite persons
Are waiting for you to finish your lesson,
Waiting to go to the blue hole,
Pile up the hippie stones,
Expose the copper head,
The bruise on your leg,
Juice in the wine,
Bodies in their prime,
Listening to the cicada choir,
Around a jumping fire.
Somebody's hand is on your shoulder.
Somebody's measuring coffee for the morning.
And there's always somebody blowing a sweet midnight wind.
But anytime you try, you can feel that wind blowing.
If you're really listening, you can hear it in the morning.
It's the same song over and over and over again.