who loves the sun

Who loves the Sun?

I remember when I was a child, and at dusk I would chase the fireflies in the fading summer sun.  Just before the sun retired to its chambers, and slept in golden slumbers and dreamt of constellations.  The sun would exhale one last euphoric breath and the effervescent Venus would appear in the gentle dark blue firmament.

Now I lavish in the absence of the sun.  I walk the streets at night, when all the secrets come undone.  I feel free inside the blackness; I bathe inside shadows, night is modest yet dignified, it’s subtle yet graceful and doesn’t flaunt like the garish sun.  The night is never as evil as convention suggests; there’s something sacred about the night.  The sun can deceive you with its radiance, there’s more devil in the sun than a thousand defiant nights ganged up in an angry mob.    

I walk the streets to find myself.  I walk until I become trapped like Houdini tied up in chains, locked inside a cage, submerged in a shark infested pool, and I try to escape before the break of day.    

At night I see the world as it is, wild and tainted, vulnerable and unabashed.  I see the beggars and the junkies, the night is a paradise lost, a carnival of humanity.  I see the vagrants and the demented, the restless youth in revelry.  I walk until the streets become my dreams.  The silence begins to speak.  I listen.  It wants to be heard.  If it isn’t heard it dies a lonely death of neglect.  Silence holds within it all the answers to the unquiet mind.  Silence recites poems, and sings in the gentle hours of dawn.  Silence and night are god’s forgotten love-children.

When I see the freaks, the hobos, the whores and the junkies, I see beauty too.  All the outcasts are like endangered species.   The sin is never as wicked as the verdict decries. There is more evil in the cloaked magistrate than in all the criminals rounded up in an angry gang. 

I keep on walking allured by the menagerie of night.  I walk past the prison.  I think to imprison someone is to kill their soul; to erase their humanity; it’s like running through the Louvre with a butcher’s knife and willy nilly slashing at the paintings.   

I walk until I reach the sidewalk’s end, and gaze upon the river that moves like an exodus of refugees in the moonlight.  The river is the only body that can bare my burden.  I continue walking from the banks onto the water, stepping softly onto the splashy surface.  Step after step I proceed to scale the surface of the river, gently traveling across her body like a delicate leaf that floats atop.  I gaze downward at the world beneath me, the swarms of fish that swim feverishly.  The tales that rivers have to tell are ever-bounding.  I grow tired and decide to rest upon the banks.  My eyes gaze upward at the stars and I begin to examine each one individually and ponder if each star had just been born or had died some ages before shinning its last dying light.   My eyes grow heavy; my lids droop downward and acquiesce to the great tug of gravity.  I begin to see darkness and from that blanket of black, a single point of light obstructs.  “Wake up.”  I hear a soft voice summon.  Intoxicated by the sound I follow the harmonic voice that resonates like a song throughout my bones and through my nerves.  I follow like a child capriciously chases a firefly in the twilight summer sky, reaching toward the effervescent Venus.