IN POPPY FIELDS WHERE SUNLIGHT BEAMS

IN POPPY FIELDS WHERE SUNLIGHT BEAMS

My eyes are blurry, glassy even,
Starry-eyed with the vaunted promise of hope.

For nightmares melt to happy dreams,
In poppy fields where sunlight beams,
My life seen through the microscope.

The scope it catches everything, the fearless highs,
The loathsome ugly lows.
Each fiber and each tissue.
The epithelial, the adipose.

The worm of hate and jealousy,
It focuses its beam on those
And then just lets them go.
Into a land of hazy silence,
Of dearly remembered peace and quiet,
Far from the streets of violence,
My inner child takes his kite and flies it.

And maybe it indeed is God I see,
While levitating quietly.
It could be heaven’s nectar that I sip.
Perhaps it’s just the morphine drip.

But I am flying past the judges in their solemn black robes,
Swirling in a land past judgment, past politics and prose.
I am lost to happy, soon to be realized schemes,
And not my usual bucket list of strange and impossible dreams.
Lost in this lovely forest, where the woodsman hums
And his companion bluebird sings.
A psychedelic land of strange, shifting sands,
Where the hot and hazy sunlight beams.

Someone whose face I cannot see, throws his or her arms around me.
Perhaps my father, perhaps my mother, perhaps the Holy Trinity.
Yet everyone is kind to me, no one’s behind me honking at a red light,
Everything’s serenely green and uniformly bright.

My eyes are blurry, glassy even,
Yet I have to trust what they are telling me.
I cannot pretend to have witnessed heaven.
Or to have walked on the water of the stormy seas.

But something lives and must remain,
Once we slip this earthly frame.
I am telling you I know it’s peaceful,
I have held it in the corner of my mind’s eye.
I’m not afraid to slip away into that feathery, velvety sky.

And nightmares turn to happy dreams,
Starry-eyed with the promise of hope,
In poppy fields where sunlight beams.
My life seen through the microscope.

-Bruce Potts
Copyright 2012
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED