The angel ushered him on.

Dense, impenetrable, jungle parted,

paths opened for the gleaming, smiling figure

with joyous eyes.

It did not seem real

His breath came in short pants.

The track rose steadily

It did not seem real.

A gaudy parrot flew clacking through the creepers above,

the jungle was vivid, vivid,

the angel eyes caught him and drew him

again, and again

it did not seem real.

 

The trees thinned.

“We have arrived” his guide said,

gesturing gracefully to the summit

 

The jungle lay before him.

But where before there had been chaos,

now he saw order.

Tracks of course,

and in the distance, the lazy smoke

from his cottage chimney

but everything else fitted

and was in place,

wildly in its wild wild place.

Every tree knew where it had to be,

every leaf had self-belief.

And still it did not seem real.

 

Without warning,

the angel touched his eyes.

He gasped and shook

as the molten fingers remade him.

 

Then opened his eyes.

And it was real.

 

And he saw that his cottage

his tidy, snug little home,

was part of the jungle.

He saw that his neat, squared-off, cultivated garden

was a jungle glade.

 

He shifted his gaze

and saw the jungle all his garden.

All was his, mastered and nurtured by his hand,

the cottage, the centre of a vast estate

of tamed wild fertility.

 

Shifted again and all was jungle,

Shifted again and all was garden.

Shifting, shifting, shifting...

 

shifting....

 

and he awoke

in his armchair

in his neat little cottage.

His cup of tea

cold beside him.

 

Half-dazed, dazzled and haunted

he wandered into his garden.

He stared at the dense, impenetrable jungle

over the freshly clipped privet hedge,

and said, quietly to himself

“Now where did that angel start?

That dream was no accident.

There's a path here

for finding.”

 

These poems flow from what pictures come. It feels like this may be the last. Did I hear "Thank heavens for that" ?  Many thanks to those who have commented