The Island of the Greater Good.

"They went out, locking the door of the theatre behind them; and Utterson once more leaving  the servants gathered about the fire in the hall, trudged back to his office to read the two narratives in which this mystery was now to be explained,"  

-Robert Louis Stevenson, from DR. JEKYLL & MR. HYDE

If you've ever dreamed of being dumb as grass
Now's your chance.

The time is right, too,
To read about all the classic monsters--

To gloat over the captive conservatory science
Of Victoriana--

Reassuring yourself:

I may only know a little useless bit of right now
But I can draw a smooth, deductive line around
The past:

The cowcatchers of their trains and black bunches of jubilee clothing,
And the spiritual significance of their orchids.

If you've ever wanted to be dumb as grass and answer to no one
Look just ahead,
And listen
For the singing is here.
Are you blue, are you lonesome tonight?

Do you have a moment to ring like a bell.

The love I've lost has flowed beneath the buck-tooth parted ways in the fence
While I watched the dew raze the grass-fed beef of things.

I really thought if I was beautiful I might live through anything.

Each time, for what it's worth, my enemies beat me because they were small

And slipped through my fingers, while my arms
Rang bells and washed dirty clothes in the rain..

Now, look, the reddest thing anyone can see
is here.

It comes first and it pronounces itself like a lion--

Naive, and roundly roaring landscapes, and bronze hair.

Maybe the part of me that brushed up against you needed the impossibility of
Completeness, as much as the certainty of nothing,

I looked at you, or I would have,
Shivering in the green cotswold of my own two hundred page novel.

I know the grass is yellow at its stems, and gentle things die in fires.  And Leontyne Price
Would sing til we reached the ledge of our flat earth and went over.