Farewell Cassandra


Who you are in a long line of selves. Millport times segues by in sixties era organic celluloid frames. In Life’s Theatre. Adolescent spirit yearnings of light and dark. Blood, brain, skin, nerves, cells proliferating always an aching underlying pain hungers for mystic myth, for eternal spirit. Images shatter into colored glass pages. Green piny hills, silver winding streams and blue singing waterfalls where rustic fey mermaids and turtle gods exist in words made flesh. Shining like ancient eternal forms living forever in the eye of spirits passing bye. Farewell Cassandra sitting on your pastel rock on a pixelated shore gazing out upon gently billowing waves of aquamarine.

Cut forward/To Madison Tennessee

Indian Joseph abandons the pine clad forested hills of Millport and returns to torpid southern lands. How did this change occur? A sudden mystic warp in space time, elliptic awakening from an extended fever dream? No ? He caught a Trailways Bus and his almost grown thirteen year old self flailed along magic arcana caterpillar lines into another facet of dimensional metamorphosis . He does not fare well on long bus trips. The diesel fumes reminded the subconscious spirit of noxious Hadean odors perhaps. How many lifetimes lived already, and myriads to come. In years bygone as a very young boy his Mother Anais and he would at odd intervals commute from Air Force bases where Benito was stationed in Texas or Georgia to Tennessee to stay with Anais’ mother Emmaline. (Benito, El Hefe, Nuevo Napoleon, ragaholic, broken sea of dreams, lost soul scavenging for manic, worthless treasures of pilfered Aztec gold under arid, hot Texas skies.)Now, lots of weir waters under bridges later, once again Indian Joseph repeats this hereditary pattern alone.
On the highway, on a Trailways bus. Blasts of adolescent endorphins, precursors of tumbler adventures, biochemical cocktails trick the brain. It is an old story of youth, cast in trajectories of the commonplace and somehow too miraculous to imagine what happens from moment to moment.

In another moment he is on the bus. Trailways blaze the roads Americana circa Sixties euphemism rushes in every vein brain river tributary. Got a ticket to ride, so let’s go young one unweary wary would be warrior manchild.
The bus magically appears out of thin air, the tires are circles of rubber and the windows tinted smokes. Climb aboard the choke fumes time machine thou intrepid sorcerers apprentice. A cross is shining questions out there on far horizons. Perhaps the land and sky shall somehow dissolve into seas of sleep. Some dreams of that which was and is yet to be awaits your cracked bells and whistle voice.

Bus is a wormhole into a constant present future. We are past all that now.

Ride through each magic portal. Transform. Transmute. You are that which is. Is that which you?
Well, which is it? Now.

About twenty something hours later, rolling down that phantasmal road, he arrives. Mid South aura skies emit coloring book parking lots, stores. Gothic comic page frames, cars and drivers. We the passengers participate in our own loop the loop static comedies, drama tragedies, oh the journey.

Bus pulls into Nashville station. Grandmother Emmaline stalwart salt of the earth original pioneer southern woman is waiting there to greet her eldest grandson as he exits the time tube on wheels. Emmaline, she of the caul, the mystic veil, quasi biblical prophetess, seer of dreams and visions.
Once again she comes to rescue fetch her changeling grandson, a strange young savage soul seeking poetic grace in a stranger homeland
Cannot recall particulars of conversation.
Only imaginary narratives now. The disintegrating borders of bygone era portraitures.
They go to Emmaline’s ride, a gray English Ford powered by angels unawares parked nearby.
Time to drive to Emmaline and her husband Popeye’s home in circa 1966 Madison Tennessee.
Madison Square Mall, an A&W Root Beer Stand, Montague Drive-In Movie lot, inhabitants of the shifting local temporal ghost songs highway strip. This lot will be I.J.’s psychic early adolescent backdrop for the near passing present future.

So another abrupt sudden slow motion dissolving celluloid frame of time painted lights for a soul in search of self to experience.

Now home is a little cinderblock building down a gravel road named Yale St. that dead ends at the Cumberland River. When Spring rains come hard and heavy this cinderblock home gets submerged up to the roofline. This was just another bump in a watery road. Not the end of the world.

Still World gonna World. A new school year for the boy in Madison now. He left Millport in the middle of his 8th grade year and went on to Neely’s Bend Jr. High for the second half of 8th grade. Boy oh boy moving often and jumping from school to school just part of a fragmentary life pattern experience.

Do not fall into utter nothingness so soon. The Day is yet young.








Poetry by Chaucer Whethers The PoetBay support member heart!
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Written on 2026-09-08 at 16:55

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