Maybe rolled too tight to even burn slowly. I am that cigarette. And also, like a shooting start, who I am when I’m loving, when I’m full of hope twisted in-between dreams, when I am lost in anger or sadness, I am fleeting. All the faces that I wear, remind me how far from complete I actually am.

Like a cigarette – rolled tightly. Too tight to burn slow. Then as if from a sudden burst of air – miraculous oxygen, I am indeed a shooting star. My head, wrapped tight with these dreams like headaches, heartaches, like wisdom and fear, all become fireworks exploding before the exhibition even begins.

There is a man who lives his life backwards – a reminder to the people of how fragile the balance between nature and the Grandfather who rules all the spirit things truly is. He is the solid and only sense of what is real.

He gives all men dreams and takes dreams away.

What is most real, after all, is certainly not the newborn’s first wail and screech – after their first gulping attempt to gather air into young, hopefully perfect lungs. Nor is it the look of immeasurable joy in the eyes of the mother, or the father’s looks and smiles mixed with pride. What’s real and forever, is our last dying breath.

This is traded with the Grandfather for space somewhere in that second world he has waiting for all of his children. Well, all of his red children. I can only speak for us. And sometimes even in this capacity, I would prefer not to speak at all.

There is a saying that those of us who stay and become a part of each other – close as the hands on the end of our arms, are the ones who have the greatest reason these days to tempt the soul open with betrayals. And the closer we are, the easier these betrayals become. As if we don’t have enough to worry about.

A betrayed soul is not unlike a soul filled with evil. Although it’s true that one is empty, certainly a disaster of its own tolerance, it’s own foolishness or pride, and while the other soul, filled, yet through and through only with evil – both the evil deeds and the thoughts that spawn evil deeds, they both have little chance for a true renewal in that space with the grandfather – the second world.

This can only mean that they must find again here, a husk of the living to come back into – alas, there is only room for one – our bodies are weak to begin with. How could they fare with a true battle raging inside?

Well, as I’m sure you’ve seen once or twice before, something has to give. The host – could be you or it could be me, splits apart from the constant pressure. It happens with archaic voices – sometimes hundreds of them, or it may happen with visions, head aches, stumbling, drooling, tarring at ones flesh - ones eyes; it may even seem a subtle dissipation. Someone who is fiercely addicted to drugs or sex, to brutality, greed, or alcohol.

They can’t cease or desist from the debaucheries and their bodies wear quickly. We on the outside, only half think or believe we have even the slightest idea to the extent of pain - the loss of rationale – the ensuing madness.

Then there’s more explainable maladies. Of course when this is the case, rarely if ever is the mental and physical deterioration attributes to the spiritual – nay, cosmic battle being wage inside that person – an original soul fighting for its sovereignty and the interloper, fighting for a  chance to expel the soul and return to the Grandfather a victor.

And the space we leave here for others? Well, it is not so innocuous as it appears – as it’s taught by the major religions – all pathetic shams – rank hustles created by man for mans’s own vanity – that he alone, possesses the only actual god.

I’d been ranting it turns out,. My car was drunk and had brought me to the end of the old village road – the edge of a wide and slanted cliff, padded green top, and dropping that green down for several feet to finally curl under the cliff’s ledge, making a beard of grass.

This place had been named by the “People” hundreds of years ago, quite simply, the ”Edge of the bearded one.”

This was where my Uncle Pete – “Whiskey Pete,”  told me many times when I was a boy and my head was an empty thing – clear and lucid, without memory of pain, that the “People” had driven great foaming, sweating, thundering herds of buffalo off the very same cliff that the front of my 1972 Buick La Sabre now dangled precariously from, just inches over the edge….