Under flickering porch lights…

It is that time of the day when you sit on your porch and the world seems to turn the page. Under flickering street and city lights the world looks different…it shadows the garishly brightness of the day.

The day’s lights are dimmed just enough that you still notice the outlines of the world that surrounds you, yet slightly obscured by flimsy sheets of darkness that sensuously drape over everything.

You adjust your sight, as well as your other senses, slowly to this new reality, and start noticing all that was shut out by the brightness of the day…the sounds and smells of your surroundings start to take place upon the sooty fabric of the night, and your senses tune in better to the overall ubiquity of your muffled surroundings.

Gently a faint twinge of warmth creeps over your skin as it bids its farewell for the day. An imperceptible aroma of warm copper wafts in the cool night air. The soft crackle of a home fire or two interrupts the white noise produced by the soft hum of electric lines that covers the immediate world. The rustling sounds of slumbering creatures stirring fill the void.

In the periphery of one’s senses lurid shadows flitter shying away nervously under the flickering instances of street lights. Swarms of warm microscopic beasts, sleepy creatures freshly awakened by the fall of the sun, flittingly rise from cooling open fields to the faint promise of the electric hum of the porch lights like phantoms of yesteryear swirling gracefully in the waning dusk.

It is then, under the silent hum of the porch lights, that you start to wonder and to imagine…to softly re-create your surroundings with the wonders of your inner senses…to slowly flesh out a world that has divested itself of its slighted imposture to reveal before you its hidden side…

In the mottled twilight of day’s end soft wisps of “maybes” and “could bes” rise as muted dreams of possibilities swirl playfully in the minds of lonely beings that silently witness the vanishing light of day.

Slowly words fall into place. Images begin to coalesce around a sound, around an idea. Senseless stains on virgin canvas take meaning as lines and curves converge upon open fields of white to give form and substance to a dream.

Muted forms linger softly upon the shadows of the norm. They walk carefully through the recently abandoned precincts of the brave, of sullen entities that disparage their presence with their brevity in being, in caring, in defining their fellow beings as others.

In the darkness, muted forms display their wares upon the inky cool blankets of the night; beings of shifted forms inhabit unrecognizable parapets and venues to delight in the precarious traverse of shiftless forms through tenuous fissures of dark and light.

It is all a dream. A well-meant offering from yesteryear. A once upon a time innocently wrought from afar to sway away your fears and despairs.

The softness of the night soothes these fears with its enveloping mists of hope and calm…the darkness offers a reprise from the harsh reality of the light, from the harsh sentences of prying eyes hidden behind the tinted warmth of the flickering porch lights.

It is all a wish upon that one star that mockingly lingers above all of creation daring you to dream, to believe that you are the one among many others who equally believe to be the one and only one. To wish upon it to be someone in a world of many who seemingly mimic your dreams, your aspirations to be. So wish upon your star…before in its indistinct insolence it decides to fall away…