Drawing Islands In Despair
By Jeff Sloan
At birth we are set aboard life rafts and sailed toward a black unknown.
Lonely, parched, starving, railing against cruelty, rallying our thin morale as we paddle our desperation towards an unknown shore.
The waves of experience battering the sides of our craft as we drift ever onward, lost in the cold frenzy of life's cruel sea.
Provisions dwindling
Birds circling hungrily over our heads in the bright, inaccessible skies. Bottomless fathoms of water below hide leviathans and the origins of our truth.
A storm fattens the clouds and enlists the rain and the wind for actors in a nature play. The steady rumble of oncoming difficulty speeds the metronome of our hearts ever faster.
This is the first assault, a society oceanographic come to taunt and alter and judge.
The boat was no match for so fierce an onslaught.
Our unconscious bodies float gently in the ozone of storms aftermath.
Lifeless we dream in the saline brine.
We wake on a beach of white sand, with the sun in our faces and the cool remnants of a breeze in our hair. Survivors of the storm of our lives, victims of existence and whim.
We are alone together. An island pair ragged bearded and smiling.
This cool poverty has a freedom smell so enticing it makes us dance in the brute sunlight of this impossible afterlife.
Grass hut, animal-hide hammock, coconut beverage container, wood bonfire, fresh meat and vegetation.
But where is this island? It can exist only in the mind. For truly we have been in traffic, or board meetings, or picking the kids up from school. The cleaning undone, the wash set in piles, the cooking, the pretence for company, the alcoholic evening psychology sessions for one, the binge eating, the excuses, exercise guilt and tender scales. We are a mockery of monkeys and a bastard of evolution. The unhappy genius, the capable fool. Taxed and caged by our peers. This is no island. Reality is a continent for sheep and cowards.
For happiness, I would walk willingly, unarmed, without provision into the waiting sea and be drowned for a chance to live deep inside my island.
***
Ever yours'
J.S.