the voice in the forest

come to me, sweet and natural, and i was just a boy - wanting to be an adult. i explored the world with rebellion, for the expected seemed lifeless, boring, banal: who's keeping the good stuff? found the old tadpole pond, filled with croaks of many kinds - their green leathery skin some bumpy, some smooth but i liked their eyes most of all! a tunnel loomed before me, as i hesitated to enter and heard an urgent voice call out come enter; a feral looking man with a rabid face honking to bring me in, never talk to strangers and so i fled. later on that day i rehearsed the events, found an owl whose piercing eyes bore right through my soul - i too felt the heightened sense of awareness, the night's cool sweat sweeping off my face and i clenched my fist hard the next day when my teacher found me dozing away. to stand outside the classroom again, to be lectured on the virtues of confucius: which i knew not for i found the idioms, the proverbs to be long and utterly meaningless so once again - more punitive measures to my dismal spirit as i tried to remember what the keen rabbit told me just the other day when it hopped through the dying fields in search of a new home deep within earth - where teachers do not get to lecture! that night it appeared my parents were particularly worried, the usual - oh is he going to make it when he is always this distracted, this unruly, this. could not for the life of me understand why the bumps, the hiccups, the sky turning like the sun seemed to unfaze learned adults who took everything that happens as truth. there is a kink in the armor, a maelstrom in the making and no one appears to be listening save the rabbit, the owl and the frogs/toads. the suction comes, water wheezes, coughs into the thin corroded pipes, then nothing. an empty sink filled with air almost solid like. i breathed in solid fumes that got trapped in my lungs. it was liberating, it was fantastical prana dissolved - i listened attentively and became an empty sink.