ZONKOUT

ZONKOUT

Please! Cover the Sun!

My eyes are over-exposed.

Space is out of control, orbits wobble,

harmony gone to static.

I’m standing on the launch pad,

my scream no longer heard above the after-blast.

You play my guitar, violent flame.

My immortal pen is in my checkbook.

Quickly! Hide my treasure.

Not on the National map,

but in a secure place

where only a car can get at it

by running over my head.

Drive telephone poles through my ears

to preserve my sense of hearing,

because an incessant drool of popular incantations

offers no insurance against a dented mind.

That soft flesh will deflect off metal

and wind up cast in color on a black automobile.

Insanity will take charge early in a crisis,

disregard the penalty for committing

the political act of growth

just to gather a handful of time.

When I, the anxious one

crying on the fringe,

am swept below the ground,

neighbors will say the site

had once been a cemetery.

While sitting to ponder,

I leaned my hand on the grass.

When I raised it minutes later,

the palm was a whole new pasture

of heart and life lines.

And I dreamed that first thing in the morning,

the increasing rowdiness would focus

at the base of a mountain and travel

either to attain its aim or any other place.

Yet still, the political pamphlet, written-off and altered

by a series of Engineering Change Orders,

cracks under the pressure of Presidents,

and is thrown as a moth-wing

to the withered groundskeeper

with a nailing staff.

Had I held my breath a minute longer

I would surely have died without one word.

But the thrust of a flower split my hypnotic reverie,

and I stood up on my page and spoke.

However, while on my way to the bathroom to read,

the electricity failed, the radiator bled.

My body tripped and flew,

shattered through the dark window,

and glass-edged anarchy divided my heart and life.

But electricity now succeeds in stars.

So, passing through reflections,

re-escaping to capture again and again myself,

I brush through and whisper secrets to the World.

And these thoughts fly toward you like a rock

thrown by a joker who ducks when you turn

as it strips in the wind past your ear,

silent as a cat running along a railroad track

ahead of a train breaking its gears before the pain.

Zonkout as Mother and Father

kiss me “good night” on the forehead.

                               Dennis Fredrick Evans