#poetry - on the ocean with you

i am sorry for my silence
and absence today.
have not been able to bring
myself to talk to anyone,
so please do not take it
                  personally.

most present in my mind
are a backlog of concerns
that must immediately be measured
and brought to swift control.

i am fast
with realization that,
until then, any pleasure
this world offers
amounts to only the thinnest apparition,
having no security,
nor promise of future harvest---

being no real thing at all
except whatever realness
there is of a dream.

i've recognized in you
a great and beautiful spirit.

no part of me wants to tamper with that.

so i owe you this explanation.
i'm not bleak as
the last bit of writing implies.

but i am stretched thin
having expanded outward
in all directions

and so to conserve myself
long enough to effect
the resolutions of my concerns,
its time to retract
and focus down
as if it were a fact
there will be no tomorrow
and so it must all be done tonight.

for what its worth,
i wanted to be out
on the ocean with you today.

na, na-na, na, na, na

one night for some odd personal reason
i got in a sport fisherman's boat
and stole out in the harbor of the old whalers,
passed through the hurricane dike walls
and lost myself in thought by the time
the old lighthouse rolled on by.

the wind picked up and became storm.
the high seas proved to be
a better captain than me,
and i went into the hold for the night
holding on to the thought of lost time.
but it did feel right then to be on the sea.

days may have gone by, i kept myself hidden.
then rough waters calmed
and the keel scratched hard and loud,
when halting, i knocked my head and reeled about.
topside. cloudless the sky. full day light.
and deserted beach stretched out like wings.

i fell out of the boat, flat on the sand.
dune grass in the wind clawed out for my hands.
i struggled to my feet and saw a high wall of stone,
lonely and natural. there beside this wall
a deserted rowboat lay, half eaten by the ages,
and upon the wall were scratches. legible. a message.

dear angel

to come of age, a crucible,
to make it there, a cannibal,

calls the coming age, your crucible,
but not to me, a man of all,

so not to be an animal
i am here, not there, a wall.

na, na-na, na, na, na.

there were no signs of life beyond these words,
there was only a hint of death
in the half-eaten row-boat.
i thought i might look around for bones.
i thought i might try to pull a fish from the sea.
i made a sandcastle and sat inside it awhile.

a crucible is not dreading the time
it takes to be ready,
for the things that are constant,
for the things that are changing.
i am not a wall. i can have more
than just a few lines scratched upon my surface.

i can launch from the port of the whale
and land on deserted shores
and encounter the echo of old woe
and be perhaps its only witness
and return to port, and make room in my heart,
for an angel or a half beaten rowboatman.

i can do these things and more,
and will, but still---
na, na-na, na, na, na.