THE TRUMPET

Putting words to shame is the magic of mushrooms, mother's milk of a Gaia river boat floating through veils of imagination. Bits and pieces gathered for a graphics object tried to keep pace, looking like that octopus did when it squeezed down a sink, bored with life in a lab. Right there, or here, we find the Pulgas Water Temple mocking an artesian spring, sending up foam that seems like the past but turns out to be a future, from amongst several on loan, sent back to confound time that got rail-roaded . . .

But as I've learned, it was more like someone switched the track and here we were(are), and getting back to the future(here) was a short order cook pushing cubes of sugar, each with a drop of blue acid, shoved through the window of a food truck, yelling out to the kids – Hi Ho! And who are you?

I gave her Alice's Restaurant, and went back to knitting tunes on my guitar. How dim the way, until it comes back round again. And you, John and Marsha in your sexual slipperiness, were unable to focus on forms at the entrance to Plato's cave. Since I've called you back nonetheless, tell me, where did they come from? Let's be charitable, non-mystical, and chalk them up to Plato's mind. It would occlude light and we, the deluded ones, would take shadows for reality – but whoa! It's encased in bone, impervious, opaque to light. Oh, he must have thought long and hard to come up with objects that we took for real.

All of which is why, during our trips, I took a seat in the back of the bus.

While playing keyboard, though, sometimes completely new music moves through my fingers without warning. Next comes the effort to capture it. What just happened? Try to do it again, slow it down out of memory, get the notes back just as they were. Sometimes that works, and sometimes it seems that, though it was no accident, they do not want to come back, as though a great secret had escaped and I lacked the proper clearance to repeat it.

It begs something of an apple barrel on the porch to begin making hard cider. Some patience. Let it ferment. Distill it. We can skip all the crushing details.

If Twinkie starts with a frantic back leg on her ear, do we need to see the flea? The end justifies the means.

To nudge it somewhat elliptically, add a little sweetener, such as that time Twinkie got to ride a tug boat that was mentoring a cruise ship. She had fallen asleep on her blankee, waking up in a dream.

In late afternoon, when I'm done playing piano, it's time for a nap, to let what I've learned sink in. The blankee goes over my legs, with Twinkee stretched out on top, sometimes snoring. Whatever anyone thinks, if we both happen to be dreaming, there is some spillover. And not to imply that it's like a fog horn. In fact she snores gently, and it's sort of charming. Whether this all fits together well is a moot question. Nerfing a bit further, we fall adrift, and all those people on shore waving, certainly not the one with a fluffled white parasol, can't be relatives. Perhaps they are indeed from a place where we did not grow up, but they seem to recognize us. I wave back and yell across, explaining that we are on this apple crushing mission. But the fermentation takes a while. When the time is ripe, everything will be distilled.

Even at a distance, the cheer is audible. When we wake up it's gone.