Love enters in ways which baffle the mortal mind. I do not know exactly how it works but I imagine it happens the way one learns a language or comes to have a nightmare after spooky film. It weaves its way around our immortal breath, which comes in and out of us like our mortal wind, and the many spirits dance; for that is what it is to dream; to let the spirits dance. It is Autumn now and things will die. Things will decay. The spirits shall leave their hosts and be shuffled in the air, and they shall hide in the world. The body shall become as a vegetable, plain and lifeless, and as a child carves expression into a pumpkin, so shall man and woman decide their animation, moving forward in the schema. Ask me where love hides. Ask me which door, love, the ultimate treat, lay shining behind. I was hoping you would tell me, for my bag thus far is filled with trick. In the land of the stranger the spirit dance not. The moon austere and the sun unforgiving, the land of the stranger has no God living. Ask me where love hides. Ask me again and again. Ask me in nightmare or daydream; shadow, rainbow. Ask of me where the fruit is ripe; where the candy apple smiles delight. Where eyes may meet and where words may land; where accidental harmonies are part of God’s plan. In the land of the stranger the stillness is loud. It is death on the heart and long live the brain. The land of the stranger is fear in the lungs; man is a cough; woman, a stain. In the land of the stranger a woman is reduced, to a paycheck a month and a bottle of vermouth. But ask me once more where the love is allowed.