Dear Mister Fantasy play us a tune
Something to make us all happy
Do anything take us out of this gloom
Sing a song, play guitar
Make it snappy
You are the one who can make us all laugh
But doing that you break out in tears
Please don't be sad if it was a straight mind you had
We wouldn't have known you all these years

-Dear Mr. Fantasy, Traffic, 1968-

Take us out of this gloom, yes. There is a definite pall hanging over the psychic landscape these days. It lowers in the air of dreams, hovers and drifts alternately as a vast black web or fields of cloud pale as death across the skies of all our minds. There are shadows lurking at the heart, where the blood is truest.

But where is Mr. Fantasy? He is here yet, never fear, his mind somewhat askew. He is the singer, the artist conjuring life in paint, the teller of tales, the musician making sounds which define that great untouchable silence we all must know sooner or later. He is the seer of things as they are, the poet wringing from the dark at the back of all our good intentions golden moments. Luminous. Numinous. Gifts to the great unknown.


Our own
time, much greater and far less fortunate,
Has acids for honey, and for fine dreams
The immense vulgarities of misapplied science and de-
caying Christianity: therefore one christens each
poem in dutiful
Hope of burning off at least the top layer of the time's
uncleaness, from the acid-bottles.

-from A Prescription for Painful Ends, Robinson Jeffers, 1939 �

Ah, poetry!

I have loved it's clean black lines giving shape to a page,
the quality of it's rhyme.

I have loved the flow of words
back and forth across currents of time,
the mind incarnate in language.

I have been moved to poetry. I have been moved to tears. I have sniffed at the acid bottles, recoiled, pined for that vapored dew of honeyberry recalled once in a childhood dream and lingering still at the back of my mind. . .