The next little boat comes around the bend as the previous one sets sail.  No sails of course on these amusement park river rafts, but standing on that disorienting moving platform I can’t help but wax poetic.  I say wax poetic and I think of tall, slim candles on furnished banquet tables in foreign countries with languages that yearn to invert our *****, anglophile syntax and say wax poetic to mean ‘poetic wax’.  Wax with a flair for verbose romance.  Tall, slim, fleshy, slowly expiring under a weightless impossible flame, and thinking all along of shattered daydreams, looking into each like shards of glass and seeing not this melting candle but a solid body doused and extinguished with love and certainty.  There it is, my croissance poétique, my poetic waxing, to grow and elaborate, as wax simply does not - under these circumstances, at least. To be sure, I am still standing before my boat as my body moves constantly on the platform with no help from me.  I am thankful such thoughts find themselves so instantaneously or I would have found myself knocked under or over something or other.  I board.  Buckle.  I’ve never heard of anyone in an amusement park on one’s own; it’s usually a pair hand-in-hand, gripping each other on plummeting coaster drops in some panic-stricken foreshadowing of the taught limbs and pounding hearts that will inhabit their sheets come nighttime.  Or else a grease-stained fat lipped boy, esurient for the delicate touch his haggard mother and wicked-stepfather dole out upon his blind and handicapped sister, bound to a chair, bound to her own head, bound forever to her worn-out, frayed gingham mother and her stupid, jealous brother.  Even as my calves squeak against the rubbery seat and my knees bump with some hairy father of some screaming three, I’ve still managed to romance my setting into something far out of the realm of reality.  I’m afraid, though, I may be losing touch with it altogether.

Am I really there?  Something about the sensation of spinning and twinge in my core that feels like sickness tells me that is probably the case, but even so, I’m relying purely on a hunch.  A literal gut feeling, soon to be joined by the cold barrage of cascading water and my shoes turning wet and making my feet feel somewhat like jelly.  Physical experiences that root me in this world, while my thoughts, it seems, have died and transcended some time ago.  One blink and my transformation is complete, soaked to my center and the ride is over.  I’m exiting my little boat, orienting myself onto the platform that has kept spinning this entire time, unrelenting to anyone who would wish can this all stand still for just a moment my shoe is untied! The father of the three follows behind, but I fail to find a story for him. The faces I pass as I exit are not delicate, they do not carry with them tragic imbalances of the past, or beam with the pride of a love that seems to last forever (because it has lasted so long already, right?), they are blank. They are blank and wet and dripping like mine and they drip like they’re melting, like they are slowly expiring under a weightless impossible flame, and it is now that it has come full circle. The world as it passes has caught up once again and will continue to spin past, allowing only a moment where we both whirl together, where we are in sync and both of us have wicked step-fathers and both of us have soggy shoes and then again she will be gone, to unite with some other fleshy entity and reduce me again to my *****, anglophile syntax and my shattered daydreams and my wax poetic.  But she will be back.  And until then, I’ll drip into the floorboards and perhaps when she returns I’ll have something to show her.

Whispers of clouds brought to life
From a child's observant hand,
Tied firmly with twine
To mine
Are puddles now,
Unfathomably deep and yet
Impenetrable,
As a windowpane in a lamplit room facing the glossy
Liquid tar of the night,

And sometimes I see the sky
And sometimes I believe I can see the bottom
And sometimes I see my own face staring back up at me,
Tinted grey,
Wrinkled by age or the tiny footsteps of waterbugs
That have found solace in the stagnant water,
And my eyes are glassy and unfocused
And my nose is crooked,
And I am tempted to take a tiny cup
And drink from that tepid pool
Dip by dip
Until the water has drained
And the bottom is no longer an elusive phantom
Masked by a pallid imitation
Of the life that breathes before it,
And the waterbugs and their skittering legs
Are all inside me
Where they bounce around in my warm skin
So I,
Too,
May remember how it feels to be alive,
But the dirt under my fingernails
And the husks peeling from my shoulders
And the tendril roots anchoring downward from my toes
Craft,
In their chthonic shelter -
A suffocating darkness of soil
That strips the eyes and lungs of their familiar needs -
Some lyric
That sings of a new desire
And an emanating warmth that reprimands my very body
For being so naïve,
To think that it
May whither away
Should the sun set on one Summer day's
Dusky glow
(So reminiscent of the afternoons
Where you would grip my fingers and guide me through
The ins and outs
Of ravenous caterpillar holes
Bitten into the leaves
Of the alder trees,
Never allowing me to forget
How you despised their aberrant bodies,
"Freaks of the natural world,"
And I would tell
To closed-off ears
Stories of transformation
And the butterfly that fed
On the ugliness of a fat insect
And turned it into romance)
So I abstain
From my brackish libation
And sit back,
With my dusty hand,
Burnt from the grip of the string,
Pressed to my parched throat,
My stale reflection retreating over the edge
Of the pond,
And,
From my new perch,
See,
The sliver of the Moon,
In her own reflection,
A promise,
Of the Sun that approaches on his handsome chariot,
And wait,
For the return of day
And,
A new face
To wash
Ashore in the tide.