Last Boat Out of Lilliput

“Your pain is the breaking of the shell

 that encloses your understanding. 

It is the bitter potion by which the

 physician within you heals your sick

 self. And so I trust the physician and

 drink his remedy.”

                        ~Kahlil Gibran

I’m grateful for gray skies,

I can’t lie;

the sun reeks of privilege

and I’m nothing if not

prodigal. 

What else are we

to make of 

a sun worshiper

who comes to prefer

the rain

and chooses chalk

over slate?

I’m trying 

to be willing

to be vulnerable, 

a ghost plotting 

to raise the living

rap by tap. 

Whose mind

is a spookhouse

that haunts

itself.

My better

thoughts

appear out of 

nowhere;

an art

for want of

a billowing sheet

to act as a sail.

Without me my dreams

can’t exist.

So they’ll do anything

to keep me here.

Like another

Gulliver

I catch

their arrows tethered

to threads 

whizzing nightly

over my head.

I’d like to hang 

onto nothing

but am

unable to let go.

I close my eyes 

yet continue

to see,

my memory clinging

like muscle 

to a bone.

I step over 

myself.

We pin our hopes 

on something new

except that

all new things

become old 

the moment 

we claim them.

Why trudge through 

life as if it 

weren’t a poem?

Why tread on lilies?

My diary says

the day I fell 

in love

I fell ill.

My symptoms

more than

apparent,

were nothing

if not devastating;

I was afraid I

wouldn’t survive.

That I would grow

small by osmosis

in the Beloved's

presence.

At the same time

ordinary things

were imbued

heretofore by

chimeras.

Though slammed

to the ground,

my head yanked

up by my hair

and dust kicked

into my eyes,

inside my chest

a cacophony 

of fireflies

lit up my

insides.

I grappled

with the possibility

of escape even

as I realized

my own 

ground zero;

I was no longer

of the slightest 

importance.

I had been

subsumed,

one sole

emotion

eclipsing

every

feeling.

If green were life

and red were death,

I reached for blue.

But the ones

who know not 

what they do

are never porous.

What they want is

of no importance.

Complaining is

an empty gesture 

signifying nothing.

Crowning me 

a makeshift King,

utterly pointless.

All I can do

is pry myself open

in search

of more patience.

This is how I will 

come to terms 

with

solitude.

Discarding myself

along with all 

the other things

I thought would

save me.

What use is innocence

that begins in mourning?

Everyone steps over it,

a dead beetle unmourned

on the garden path.

So I try 

to wring truth

from yet

another dream.

The bed a relief map,

I am the demarcation 

between night and day.

I slowly remember 

my body

even as I savor 

its nightmares

unspooling like a negative 

of un-capturable

phantoms.

I regain my bearings.

clenching my feet,

stretching out my legs,

as if I were chained 

to a rack in some light-

deprived dungeon.

On return, 

safe in my room,

I pour my wine

back into its bottle

and wonder how

after all I’ve done, 

the arc of age

has returned me

to this

innocence.

8/3/21