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Peyote Buttons


by Brian Michael Barbeito


In the sides of mountains the rivers rush through and who would stop them as they gain a hold on the world? For silences they keep just then, as if from a larger wisdom and different clock. Pink moons and funny coins with the heads of lions and lambs, and the quarter life fields where the wild shrubs grow. Still there is the spinning witch by chemical ravines and her amulets catch a certain light. You thought she was adorned of nothing but how could a true practitioner not look the part? Going and going and the birds come back black and in groupings of hundreds to wait on wires for some inner prompting or outer blessing. The lumber before the slaughter wait like firecrackers and then shoot prana to the skies. I was trying to show you the tree of life, and when we stood by here or there I could not see it. But one day, beside industrial chic glass twenty feet tall, we stood on a ledge and slightly entered the edge of knowing. We saw not the same old infrastructure clouding the world, the roads and walkways that didn't know yet, as is said, that pride goeth before the fall. No, we saw the tree in the distance, higher than the others, a home near the top where the hawk nest had been built. I said that if you looked closely you could tell by judging the scale of things that it was not a regular sky thing's home. Oh, jewelry and make-believe or an urban queen's secret passions, purple hats and peculiar fish that come and take a look. That nest was a good omen as we learned to read the environment. Mercury is always retrograde and there are sinister girls around. But we will make it through the vision, as the evening whiles begin and we wash our hair from where we have traveled.  We will have gone deeper and gained more grace, goodness, and knowledge than the Camenae. They will have reason to pause and say, What is this? We will win because we have no other choice. We will offer back pink flowers to the white mule and not forget the help we have received.We will birth ourselves properly. 
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