It's
a
wet, gray
morning in
mid-December, here
in South Central Missouri (the
less fashionable foot-hills of the Ozarks as it's
known by some), not exactly pouring, but
a fairly constant and consistent plip, plip,
plipping, and not exactly warm, but an unseasonably
tropical 50-some-odd degrees (almost balmy,
you might say, for this time
of year, anyway) and I have only just woken from a
strange surrealist montage of dreams, broken by
the sudden subterranean / trainyard rumble of thunder
(though there haven't been any trains
in these parts for decades);
dreams of deer roaming and snuffling, freely,
through the sleeping streets of Kansas City, Missouri,
dreams of star charts on my inner eyelids, milk
white phantom dreams, blue-black storm dreams
where-in, every night, I go up the snaking circuit
cable of the river, and every night I get
out of the boat and walk deep in-
to the dark, sweating
jungle to
confront
what
must
be
my
inner
nemesis,
only to be stalked
and devoured, again and again,
by the brightly burning tiger's fearful symmetry.
