Not a Poetry Reading: Stone Cold Crazy

By Katie Heffring

Ask me to get on the bus and take a ride to a crazy place off the coast and experience alternative ways of living and learn about the music that brought the people there together to share and exist and create

a code of conduct that leads to peace love happiness and dance naked in spinning circles across a field of colour and sound and take

the fruit of the earth with caution and care and enhance feelings with each bite before the taxi pulls in and takes the loco weeds from your tanned hands and plants

it in the minds of governmental authorities to lock up the spirits of life and freedom and put forth fear and lies, but you soon find out when the community knows this and care

for one another and newcomers respect this, the cycle of dare, share, and care continues sustainably and you ride the magic bus up and down the rolling hills and the music

of Pink Floyd’s One of These Days fills your ears and this dreamlike state follows you into the middle of a jungle where a patient still wearing his pink hospital smock with silver toes feeds you existential

philosophical answers to everything, “we are mere atoms colliding; energy rising or falling between space and time,” and all makes sense and all feels right until the drug wears off and you are once again

faced with reality and once again faced with the society of rules and regulations and unwarranted happenings that push almost unbearably against the happiness you fought so

hard for causing gravity to immobilize you and the only way to escape everything is by consuming some mind-numbing satisfaction and you wake up and find

you are living not in a world of order any longer but a world of disorder and suffocating pain and yet some emotion inside you dares not to abandon hope, dares not

to abandon love, dares not to abandon life because once you have felt what it’s like to live with fearlessness and you have seen the bravest and know that positive

energy can be transmitted but most of all, once you have felt ecstasy and this is what pumps through your veins and makes you fight for the right to be one again.