Release Date: November 1, 2007

Flowers & Vortexes

presents

Selected Poems of Xristi Megas

Her Name: Bright as the Sun

When she would go to the edge of town, peeking up through the sea of tall, golden grass, he rode his strange metal horse, but instead of four legs, it rolled on two wheels. As he would pass, she would raise her head, just above the tassels of grass, so that the deep blackness of her eyes watched his feet, shoed in brown leather, peddle his bicycle down that dirt road with dust streaming from his back tire and into the air, trailing behind him like the unseen scent-cloud of a defensive skunk, and sending out a signal with her quiet laugh. Before he could turn his head, usually so fast that his funny-looking cap’s bill would spin to the left side of his pale but extraordinarily handsome (so she believed) face, she would submerge herself beneath the surface, leaving only slight movements of grass that could easily be described as the wind.

And so, twice a day, every day for more than a week, he traveled, on his bicycle, down the same stretch of road, trying to catch a glimpse of whom it was on the other end of that entrancing giggle. One thing he knew for sure was the sweet, soft laugh had to belong to a female, goddess of the planes. ‘Perhaps, she’s a fish who laughs and swims through oceans of sparse brown grass, awaiting to kiss me, alas, she will smile, alas,’ he wrote in his journal one day, while contemplating her existence and stopping to eat a sandwich, underneath a gigantic oak that shielded him from the harsh heat of that dry summer day.

Rocket Man

She packed my bags last night pre-flight
Zero hour nine a.m.
And I'm gonna be high as a kite by then

I miss the earth so much I miss my wife
It's lonely out in space
On such a timeless flight

And I think it's gonna be a long long time
Till touch down brings me round again to find
I'm not the man they think I am at home

Oh no no no I'm a rocket man
Rocket man burning out his fuse up here alone

Mars ain't the kind of place to raise your kids
In fact it's cold as hell
And there's no one there to raise them if you did

And all this science I don't understand
It's just my job five days a week
A rocket man, a rocket man

And I think it's gonna be a long long time...



These lyrics were written by one Bernie Taupin,
and, of course, were perfomed by Elton John.


There was a time,
oh yes indeed, that these
Lyrics applied to James.

But I have since been freed
from most all the masks I once wore.

I am a librarian now,
so far from the dark places
I once inhabited,
this mask is comfortable

feels like no mask at all
at times

It just needs an adjustment
here and there
and intellectual intervals of indica inhalation

how the old crowd
would laugh
at me

and how I would not
care

just some words
no poetry
here