Number 64 Number 64 Number 64

Sweet rising,
All these perfumed things,
Out of the generous earth,
Freely offered to the lustful wind,
Lasting pieces of you and me,
Carved from our inner beings,
Plucked ripe during kisses,
Fragments stripped from you,
Segments sliced from me,
Thin slips God recognizes and sees,
Vivacious sparkles captured in a creative fire,
Flames licking at love's sweet sky,
Embers tracing borders and songlines,
Hither thither to a nether world,
Sweet rising,
Out of perilous loneliness and danger,
Into tropical bliss and equatorial happiness,
Enabling antarctic words in ecstatic sentences,
Protesting icebergs calved by subterranean mischief,
Blatantly transforming taiga emotions into petrified forest,
Golden talons tattooing masks and totems on our eagle selves,
Black holes and pin pricks scarred by cuttlefish ink and sad dreams,
So many tentacled cuddles marred and scuttled leaving sucker marks,
All this scuttlebutt and fuddleduddle rising in the warm gulf stream,
Hungry sharks sick and going belly-up from the taste of tainted blood,
Blinded whales fainting and going deaf beneath the ocean flood,
Polluted flesh and random plastic gathering in other rebellions,
Congregations of faith flung to the lions from the gates of every big city,
Unceremoniously tanked and dumped on Neptune's failing altar,
Sweet rising,
Incense bewitching these magnetic moments,
Smoke and mirrors redirecting the moon and stars,
Crude oil blinding and choking us into ritual approbation,
Conjunct nations refracting astronomy and reflective astrology,
Meeting places and constellations in the Zen park,
Rivulets of light spring rain falling in the dark,
Baptizing every crack and righteous seam,
Fractured obtuse stages in a reckless ecology,
Columns of hot poker red and calendula yellow,
Smoke tangling with chiming crystal streams,
Sweet rising,
Tumbled into deep ocean currents,
Washed and polished on windswept beaches,
Salty sand rubbed into graven wounds,
Reminding . . . us . . . we . . . are . . .,
Naked astronauts starboard on our mother ship,
Witnessing the same sunstorms,
Breathing the same earth air,
Billions of beating hearts,
Sweet rising,
Pieces of amber offered to the vexing wind,
Quarks hauled onto a high dry bank,
Fragments of what was a moment ago,
Atoms of what we once were,
Rivers of elements and other dreams flooding by,
Contained by chemistry and physics,
Constrained by pick and shovel channels,
Prayers keeping tsunami and flood at bay,
Hymns and chants so hurricanes and firestorms are stayed,
Yet there are still asteroids and broken dams,
Earthquakes and volcanoes in every land,
Galaxies far beyond Andromeda,
Comets composing orchestral universal bliss,
Cosmogony reprising imagined heaven,
Vibrato in harmonic symphony,
Maestro's magic wand held high,
Such sweet rising.