Somehow I survived the trenches
Got past all that carpet bombing
Endured whirlwinds of poison gas
Life's just willfully difficult
Inevitably ending up
Still myself all the time
Telling the other me memorable stories
Crazy old man porridge
Oats and glorious grazing with an old ram
Lowing in the high meadow
I dream about flowering dells
Shepherding a glowing ewe and golden lamb
Campfire smoke and a sweet clearing in the wilderness
Sparks and embers
Sparkling northern lights
My stark old cabin burning down
Then I oddly wake rememb'ring
All I find are ashes
Sifting charred bone
A tangle of welded relics
Twisted cast iron remnants
Such a hot wielding number
All those unwieldy memories
Past away in that brazen conflagration
Bright moonlight on a cold winter night
Smoldering sage and aged bits
Sacred herbs and brazed descendants
Razed remnants in righteous graves
Saved leftovers in growing cemeteries
Rows of consummate criers
Crazed fire and its infernal consumption
A blast furnace of roaring flames
Blazing a tornadic path
Volcanoes leaving the clan bewitched
Stitched up man
Wondering where up becomes down
Let us off this precipitous edge
I'm so close to that ridiculous ledge now
Still peril somehow
Survivalist nerves up til now
Frill speech with dead poets
Tea and crumpets
Their marmalade rhymes
Creating marvelous lyric circles
A genetic corn vortex in these farm-aide times
Crop circles and all those crystalline words
Divine fields of cryptic signals and signs
Summons from the edge of the forest
A blessed ivory Unicorn
A summer pledge waiting to be ridden
Hidden Unicorn glory
Shimmering story lines with golden clouds
Looming mysteries with mystical meanings
Rude booms wake historical folk in the gritty night
There's a mighty storm brewing
Provoking the nitty world
Poking closer to the lagging centre now
Far beyond fragmented entrenchment
Eliminating unrepentant carpet bombing
Relinquishing ill meant greed and profit
All that independent penetrating oil
Pacifying patent freedom with liquified gas
Humankind is forever scarred
Marred with old war wounds
Harassed by darting demons and farting gargoyles
Struggles with an apartment past
Still it's not the end of the world
Like that old saying
"Things will look better in the morning"
Still more rhetoric
"Better late than never"
Every place where glory exists
Beyond all those inglorious trenches
Our demented foreign past
All those scandalous bloodied battlefields
Where sad bombs and forlorn gas played
Frayed prayer flags and trying real human progress
Oh give me a home
Where the buffalo roam
Agreeable like the mystical Serengeti
So I'm still a Kilimanjaro pilgrim
John Dunn dreaming
Metaphysical prop circles
Pilgrims stopped up with quizzical thought
Propped up creation down on both knees
Why fear that imminent ledge?
That indiscriminate edge
All that insistent unknown
Digging downward
Into deeper trenches
Entrenched villagers engulfed by fiery change
Tired consuming forests of trees
Assuming some renewable nerve gas
Astrology never conspires or agrees
Free thinking at this astronomical stage
Nominal old farmer's almanac disease
No thanks to blanque cheques and rank cancer
Just dish out frank incense and kindness please
So like the Cube that 'WAS' before time
All those skanky transformations
Tragic teasing and cranking us
Pleasing pranks enduring this rugged life
Treason and tanks transforming love
All those opulent snails and slugs that cross tank trails
All those rank dreams
Spiral shells and cyclonic fires
Flooding streets with crank strife
That bloody allegorical knife
Like ruddy Jinn rising
Straying out of the secret desert
Forever lost in a blistering mirage
Staid dunes of burning sand
Deeper than all those bloody man-made trenches
Pyramids stand marking the land
Mummified Nilotic legions
Miscarriage of truth and dreams over time
All those fairy rings and unreasonable things
What came first the cube or the egg?
A course scientifically rehearsed
Supplicant cube first
Then the compliant versed egg
Hatching terse cubism
Ritual immersive eggism
Egoism at its heady best
Pledge and ritual reasonism
Surviving this edgy test