Silver Ghost Hostel

Visions persist, vapours rising from a trough where the pigs are feeding...

   No doubt I am with a friend, and we are young, standing in a clearing, surrounded by trees, by a river, information streaming from branches like light freezing time. It's impossible to decipher or decode, but leaves us euphoric. We crunch through the woods, talking of battles that might have been. Memory and mystery hammer my chest and I think about the Spanish girl we met on the island. I wear love like a scent.
   Out on the road, we walk in a delirium, the clouds above us ripe with meaning. It may be we're heading towards Eden, or an ocean. At this stage, all landscapes coalesce. There are mountains, valleys, rivers, seas in the body, limbs as windswept as boughs. Passing vehicles are narratives, family histories, fascinating radio dramas.
   "We've found the way!" I shout.
You whistle up ahead. Waterfall. Jimi Hendrix.
   Someone is bound to open a tearoom on the highest mountain, or introduce gullible Americans to ghosts. We don't talk much, but when we do, it's about important things, like imaginative Spanish flights while listening to Miles Davis, or what Katrina sounds like on half a tab of Acid. At the hostel, we are about to meet Christians in a vortex of synchronicity. No doubt I will derive much meaning from this. I am so earnest. I have come from a place where pigs are forgotten and there is refuge and rest in monasteries. You are modern; I am more medieval at present, but waking up to modernity. I am so incredibly earnest. Occasionally I wonder if you have lost your virginity. I'm sure you have, and it frightens me a little. I want to lose mine, but not yet. Not until I have captured sound. It's hard to imagine, but each of my atoms is packed with guilt and, in time, all sorts of darkness will roll in and swamp me. If I tell you this, you'll probably just laugh and speak about innocence and my death fixation.
"So serious," you'll say, and head off with other companions.
But you'll draw me in again, and what I learn will settle like silt in an estuary.
   I want you to phone me late at night, and when you do, I'll try not to be consumed by so many lifetimes rolling fear between my fingers. Our meaning will always be unspoken, because sometimes, really, too many things are said.