Kevin’s dad dropped us off
At the end of the road
So he could show us the Skull Cave
You have to know where to go
In the sea of uluhe, ohia, wild orchids
How to look for the crumbled rock entrance
And climb way back where
the day’s warmth never reaches
And there on a rock shelf,
some ancient skulls rested
We turned the flashlight off
There is a kind of dark
that exists inside caves
It’s not the dark you get
when you close your eyes
or in your bed at night
when the lights are off
It is the total absence of light
You start to feel you are floating
In the centre of the Earth
or inside your own head
When we climbed back out
we waited to be picked up
We laid down on the hot, cracked tarmac
at the end of the road
the dense jungle smells blowing over us
We showed Kevin the game
Where you close your eyes
And you press the heels of your hands over them
And you start to see things
We laid with our heads on each other’s stomachs
so we formed a sort of human trinity knot
and told each other our visions
until the images inside our heads
started to converge
I reached for that Skull Cave so many times
in the years of adolescent turbulence
Sometimes I could travel all the way down
to that darkness, that stillness, that quiet
But it's the glow of connection I reach for now
our hands pressed tight against the sun
our heads resting on each other
trying to weave together our very thoughts
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