I remember that the summer sun was as filthy and overexposed as the Woodstock documentary footage. Grit in the air snagged on my hairs and fell to my scalp, and in caught in the sweat of the joints in my hand. The sweat on my head layered over dry, sticky sheets of itself, and captured the slightest gust. The heat in my arms and chest from thrashing at the grass. The pain in my heart from moving too fast in the heat. Brush and can in both hands, I worked to see what waited me on the other end of the paper’s transformation. I looked forward to seeing a masterpiece form before my eyes, and found that I’d been fighting the heat and the pain to cover a piece of paper in blue latex. A sheet of light aqua-blue latex.

I forget
The days I’d seen go by,
And what they meant to me,
The words you give me now,
As I’d heard them the first time.

I forget
What it was like
And how simple things had been
Before the child they’d always praised
Became the very things they’d hated,
The things within themselves,
That they thought were dead,
And tried to kill in me.

You don’t know
What it means to me,
What you’ve done,
Knowing someone cares,
And giving me something
That I will never,
Ever
Forget.

Morning’s paper mask,
Worn at ev-er-y hour,
Can never wear thin.

The face is not one,
And the others see real skin,
For(e) them is a lie.

I grow very tired,
As ev’ry night fades to mo(u)rn,
I add another.

The long haired man
Walks forth, dipping and bobbing
To his own rhythm.

Nobody sees it,
None understand the music.
There is only he.

So few can hear them;
Hammers ring a melody
Just for the landscape.

Sight is his alone,
Wandering through the forest
Of shattered mirrors.

-

Glassy fragments stand
Erect upon the stone ground
And fragment the clouds.

Their true form is seen
As the day makes way for night;
Beautiful from dawn,

The great illusion
Reveals the horrible truth
Of the dragon’s teeth.

As youthful light fades,
So fades the tolerance of
High expectations.

-

Sky, once blue, is red
With the spraying, foaming blood
From the mother’s veins.

Her children fall prey,
Their rotting corpses stacked high
And eaten hollow.

The man blames himself
For what he cannot control
Within the cosmos.

The final decay
Moves slowly and steadily
To begin anew.