Jerry Garcia’s reclamation of fingertips in the face of physical frailty

The strings of the guitar
Ringing throughout the sensibilities 
Resonating throughout the plethora of
The soul’s beginnings
Meandering slowly, melodically 
Throughout the shifting sands 
Of textured hyperbole
Of everything that arises and falls 
With the dimly lit sun
At the aperture of the dawn
At the declination of the dusk

He would sit at the window
Hovering above the stains of corpuscle
Brain stem disintegration 
And wonder
How it was that every day
Would be a forlorn territory 
A subtle, sanctimonious tensile slim fissure stamen rush
Onto the needle-whipped robotic plateau of non-awareness 

These words were lessons from the ingratiated prophet’s tongue:
We must cultivate the garden 
We must rest in the rapture of the divine 
If these moments ever arise 
To lift us out of desperation
Of kettle fire finger to lip prismatic eyes
Of drawing our heads above the 
Innate sands of non-deliverance

The confusion would settle in
When the eyes flutter out into space 
Between consciousness and 
The infertile serendipity of the misdirected mind
Lost in the atrophy of unbegotten cancer rot

There are satellite fixtures
That reframe the mind 
Reassessing the centralized core 
Hovering, ever hovering 
To provide notification of the damned 
To provide a heraldic trumpet announcement 
Of the slothful perambulated arrival 
Of the dead and dreaming

Where would all these prophet fingers
Draw me into?
He would say to himself, softly 
With amorous intention
How can I breach new life 
When there is no new day
That does not despoil me in lost admiration 
For who I am, who I never was
Who I never will be?

The summoner’s place 
The deadening tourniquet millstone of darkened illusion 
Tethering me to the ground
He would surmise
Each time he would open his eyes
After despotic episodes
Of the reckoning
Of the flood
Of dripping the cosmotic rust into his veins
Slowly without the sensation of caustic degeneration
Of the washing over without cleansing