Skinwalker Ranch
Richard Stevenson
Skinwalker Ranch ain’t on no maps –
at least the parts yer interested in:
the hellmouth portals, astral wormholes.
After you’ve been there though, you’ll know:
the solution to the sasquatch/dogman quandary
ain’t all material. Hey, don’t soil yer laundry.
Don’t get yer knickers in a twist either.
I’ll get to the gist in a jiff. Just chill.
They’re hairy behemoths, for sure –
sport all the hirsute features of yer
eight-foot hominid, but they can shape-shift too,
or occupy other dimensions – and times – than ours.
We just don’t know enough about portals, black holes,
portals of egress between epochs and more proximate times.
Nothing rhymes or chimes right. Day is day
Night is night before we all go nighty night.
After that, who knows, right? Could be other
dimensions than the four we occupy.
A guy with binos saw a donut hole
in the middle of an orange mist. Through that:
blue sky, another rural scene entirely!
Mostly, folks would prefer their cryptids to stay hidden,
shift or drift through portals on their own time.
It’s our dime. We put the money in the material meter.
We wanted to raise bovines here, not get tangled in vines
of bat-shit crazy theories and misadventures. Bat piss
drips like rain on the bridge from reason to belief –
but seeing is believin’ – I’ll grant you that.
Saw a 2D wolf shadow. That set a few tea cups rattlin’.
Heard a real werewolf slavered at Al’s big truck door.
Look, I ain’t sayin’ all this Fortean guff is real.
I’m sayin’ what I saw. What I heard others saw.
That’s enough to stick in my craw. Mind’s open –
and as Charlie Chan says, “Mind like parachute –
sometimes fails to open.” Just keep your peeps open.
That’s all I’m sayin’. Print that, as you please.
