clear light, mostly

We drank the shrooms as tea in the back of the cemetery.
Only I knew how near my brother's grave we were.
As my fingers began to tingle and turn into balloons,
words became icebergs, divorced from sense.
My thoughts attained a strangeness reserved for dreams,
but these dreams walked among us, were embodied,
made manifest.
The stars pulsed through the pine trees
to the sound of our voices.
"Power is the real problem," I uttered,
a Marxist thought that astounded me with its spiritual implications.
For a moment, my friends are not there,
only myself, the moon, and the clear light,
and I'm dumbfounded into silence, staring,
the wind cold on my neck.

But then, in the houses next to the cemetery,
someone must have called the police.
Headlights came up the dirt road into the cemetery,
throwing up the smell of dust and rocks.
Robert, Les, and Snag tossed themselves drunkenly to ground
and cowered behind monuments.
I heard muffled oomphs.
I dove
out
and hugged the grass next to my brother's grave,
as the search-light stabbed out with an audible hum,
danger two feet over my head.
Waves of dancing sparks emanated from the center of my head.
I wanted to laugh, the moonlight cold on one side of my face,
the dewy grass pressing into the other,
but I did not.
The car drove by glacially, a shark gliding past unseen prey.
The distant street lights swirled and gathered into elven eddies,
and jumped in and out of my chest
as the car drove on towards the exit.

No, there is no one here.

Later, Robert, Les and Snag's beer left as a midnight offering,
we wandered off.
Air conditioners humming in the distance, cattle lowing,
the endless, atonal droning of insects,
the highway singing its deep, resonant song,
a didgeridoo from a lost, urban dreamtime.