Dreams from the Rail, the Road, and the River

"A dream can be the highest point of living,"
I told the policeman as he filed the report for persons missing.
My spirit ran away that day I havn't seen him since the morning.
My words were missing too I had too gesture out my warning
to the boatman to the river to the rail to the sky.
When I finally reached the station, it occured me to devise
a river of my own to catch my spirit in its torrent.
The policeman eyed me strangely as he triple stamped the warrant
for the seizure and arrest of this strange fugitive existence.
I went out into the heat of morning, mind racing like a piston.
"A dream can be the highest point of living."
Frantically fumbling through the faces I had met last evening.
The night's memory was a haze as I wandered lost in my bereaving,
stumbling past shops and churches filled with the believing,
wishing I was stoned or drunk or any type of feeling
to take away the livid fear and emptiness of its leaving.
The carbon copy of the police report lay crumpled deep inside my pocket,
as I remembered how I left the club last night, as my spirit lay forgotten:
nearly unconscious, sotted and sprawled amidst cocktail napkins as I soaked the
last sprays of intoxication from ruby throated pleasure decanters.

I wailed to remember and my tears splashed on the famished asphalt,
whose hungry tongue searched for salty drops amidst the gravel.
Lapping up my sorrow like a gift it had been given,
it spoke from deep within its bowels like a rock that had been riven.
"A dream can be the highest point of living."
As I wondered could I live even with my spirit gone.
Without the engine of desire could my body carry on?
By the river of this empty road all that touched me was a song
but I couldn't sing a note because my melody was gone.
And so I chanted mine in silence for the martyrs in my blood,
as kings, warriors, and priestesses, rose gasping from the river mud.
From the bottom of this water beneath depths I did not know,
came the master of the seasons, spinning sunlight, dusting snow,
looking something like Poseidon with his trident fit to throw.
The blood of martyrs in my veins cried out to join with this boiling stream
bearing the wreckage of oppression, all the detritus of broken dreams.
All the thousands of Katrinas and the cities they destroyed
All the ignorance and gossip of their schemings in the void.
The river swept it all along, swollen and brown, carrying champagne flutes and Gucci bags, overfed hiphop stars and their greedy CEOs, politicians with snouts, computers with secret passwords and cybernetic pleasure hookups, missiles and tanks and machine guns, and glossy magazines and catalogs and caviar buffets and purple BMWs, and mega-churches, full to the brim with the expectant faithful laying their Andrew Jacksons in the collection bucket for some lying unscrupulous sleaze bucket with a Bible.
All the stormy chaos of a fallen civilization swept past me in a river which became a flood, which became a wave, a compressed ocean unleashed with stunning ferocity on the world--reclaiming and returning its stolen innocence.

My spirit swept past.
My spirit swept past on the raging waters
My spirit swept past on the raging waters clutching the copy of my triplicate police report,
laughing at my desperation with the glee of a mad fiend,
as I ran along the river I created from my dreams.
In my intoxication of despair I threw myself beneath this raging.
In the darkness I was carried on the arms of the amazing.
I said, "Father I stretch out my hand unto Thee/Let the light from the lighthouse shine its beacon over me."

The Lord of Worlds caught my spirit and I in an olive tree on the banks of the river.
And in the tree was an orb, and in the orb was a light, and the light was a lamp that lit my body's path to allow my spirit to descend.
Frightened of song and dreams and sleep I watched my river end
in the iridescent pool of Allah's prophetic vision:
"A dream can be the highest point of living."