~for Verlie Burroughs, a ‘fellow’ islander poet with a sense of human humor~
walking the reservoir on a warm spring day,
Central Park littered with tourists and pale face,
fellow islanders, all of non-Algonquin Indian descent
released from Rikers Island (of course) Prison,
six month sentence served
behind bars of winter grayscale skies
and snowy steel and grey prison everything
an out-of-townsfolk young lady passes me in a pink t-shirt,
where humans these lazy days declare their entire philosophy,
“I’d rather live on an island”
and thus a poem commissioned
well, rather brought forth from the chilled, deep waters surrounding the brain where winter vegetables rooted but cannot surface,
the iced ground frozen impermitting bodies to be buried,
no war and death monument foundations to be poured,
flower-powered poems unable to pierce as well,
even with the upwards thrust of cesarean birth
and or, one last push and me begging
breathe
winter strangled
but I walked today
the Central Park reservoir and
all I got was that stupid t-shirt provocation
with
tulips and daffodils, dogwood and magnolias, and
cherry blossoms confirming,
it’s okay today to write of
islands and shoreline once more,
of
boundaries now and again
though the idea had prior brief transversed
the thought canal, was struck into action
when realized suddenly a dawning -
a l l m y l i f e, I h a v e l i v e d o n a n i s l a n d
counting backwards seven decades with a
collegial exception, of living by a great lake,
which is but an island in reverse,
poet cum prophet had to always walk on water to get home
<•>
my poems are travelogues,
not pretty words and tonguing talk,
sorry not,
more tales than wagging tongue wordy tails
but dumbstruck by the ocean notion that I live by the
grace of an Ocean that waits patiently to reclaim my island,
stealing my unborn poem children and
tried with a Sandy haired girl a few years ago
hurry home to scribe, and imbibe,
write upon its streetscape
with colored chalk and
upon it once more,
the concrete paths and
a reservoir dirt path surrounding and shorelines
that are all the shaping of me
all my life, and Neverland realized
I am a seagull disguised as human*