From out of the depths of a Listerine green sky came the breath of light, the breath of great Bog, all the breath of all the planets and galaxies and exploding stars.

From out of the creaking silver windmills of the West, the hawks flew, and the crows murdered, and foxes screamed like victims deep in the forest of night.

From out of the smiling faces of an east end sidewalk café, came the talk and the laughter, and the words that would mend, and the words that would break a heart in two or three or one million pieces at a breathless pace.

From out of the canals of Bourbon River came the drive to row a boat of red straight out to the sea just to be alone and bobble like a cork in champagne solitude, to put a face straight toward the sun, to close the eyes, to feel the heat and burn of being alive but alone, but dead, but buried, but carrying burdens unmatched…

Like bags out of a mop-white grocery store that smells of disinfectant and chicken frying in an oil bath, mums a bloom, the colors of a crisp October day streaked with caramel apple suns and bruised clouds stretched and kneaded like Heaven’s own bread.

What a place it could be for us, for us all, just subtract the greed and the hate and the longstanding feuds. Erase borders with the pink end of a big pencil. Send the war machines to Earth’s core to become nothing but lava batter. Millions of fools live in Opposite World.

From the beach comes forth the one dressed in black, a head on fire, those Sonic Ocean Water blue waves behind him curling and crashing like band cymbals in bathwater.

Someone sits at a desk in a cold room sipping hot coffee and thinking about and wondering what the new day will bring. And he wonders about it with a degree of hope, a degree of worry, a degree of panic…

The varying degrees of life, of love, of willful disobedience or chagrin or fame or lying on the ground with a body full of broken bones. What will it be this day of the drawing?

In peace in the dirt and looking up, it all makes the sky look more wonderous and broad, fuller of the belly-side of Heaven or the escape hatch of hell.

The man in the umber brown suit sits on a fire escape in a big city tossing smoked cigarettes down into the alley, he can hear the girl on the other side of the glass yelling at the walls, now she’s fixing a meal full of poison. The last cigarette falls through the sky and lands on the faded roof of a green car, the motor sputtering, the exhaust blooming a cloud in the cold, she drops a pan in the kitchen, she bellows madness to the broom closet. She’s become unhinged, he climbs down the fire escape, drops down into that cold gray alleyway, turns left, walks, disappears into a smoky, noisy pool hall for relief as if he just got out of jail. He sits on a stool, orders a beer, lights a long-awaited for cigarette like Mr. Kool. The bastards never let him drink or have a smoke in his cage because he was merely an animal. They beat him for his suffering. He gently taps the tip of the menthol into an orange plastic ashtray, smudged like a liturgical forehead on Ash Wednesday by a dirty priest. Billiard balls smack together behind him. A gathering of nobodies emits a cloudburst of laughter. He in turn releases the biggest sigh of his life and phones the aliens to pick him up out back where the landing field is. For him, happiness is just another planet.