Homage

Ghosts

What is in mind is a sort of Chautauqua -that`s the only name I can think of for it –like the travelling tent show that used to cross America.

What do you do when what seek is a ghost?

 But what kind of ghost I hear you ask?

Well what about one which comes from our past.

I was such a man, who stood with time divided in a single span,

A man who followed a path so pure,

That it took me from a place which seemed so secure,

Why I hear you ask, why did you follow this dangerous path?

What can I say that except I felt this was the only way.

 Now I write but I really don`t feel contrite,

Why should I when all I did was step aside and try to see what went on inside,

The figure I recognise even though I do not let one,

 Is Phaedrus, evil spirit be gone.

The world in which your life was led is now mine instead,

Your place is with the dead, the insane should learn their place,

And not to fill those who live with dread.

So why now when it`s dark you feel that it`s your place to come back and haunt?

Surely your cost was high enough to make the even simplest man wish to stop?

Was it more than a simple inquiry into values? 

That led them to take your liberty away as you sat and swayed.

A glass door, behind which Chris waves,

I see that you try to reach out but as you did you saw that`s is a door of a coffin instead,

Yours, but I`m not so sure that you realised before,

You had to say goodbye as you watch Chris scream and cry,

Only years later that you, I, realised that someone has to deal with degenerative forms society and intellect,

Those who thoughts just don`t parry,

Take them away to place which is safe,

Where you`re (our) thoughts will not lead others to disgrace,

So if you`re going to pick a fight about what you believe is right,

Don` t start with the psychiatrists or the cops alright,

Those in power will not cower with your might,

But they may just throw away the key for good,

Leave them to last, when your logical thought will blast those tired pillars from the past,

So what you, I, we did was to learn to play the game,

Not to seem insane, so they would let out us again,

But now you`re coming back,

Who will become the ghost if you do?

The one was taken away when those electric shocks went astray?

Or the one who came about in those magic volts? 

If you do return then will your ghost come back to haunt?

The one which led you to become me with such shocking electricity,

Would that drive you once again to open up Pandora`s box?,

To seek that ghost that`s behind the door of western thought,

Where the earliest Sophists taught that all principles, all truths, are relative,

That man is the measure of all things!

Where those cosmologists thought about the origin and structure of the universe,

Those pre-Socratic philosophers fought,

 With pointed words which went on to create the basis of modern western thought,

Those ghosts you took on and lost,

Whose battle scarred waste land you now haunt. 

What you did come to see was that the strongest ghosts we have are the ones inside our heads, the ones from times long since dead.