Red Sailboat

i had a dream that when i died they built me a gravestone like a little red sailboat and cast my watery bones out to sea where my thoughts rose and fell with the tide and yesterday’s sky was still magic

and each morning i’d push the fish off my deck and shake the gulls off my masts and stretch my legs to Led Zeppelin’s “Ramble On” while the trade winds took me, mind full of poetry like an infinity of open shores, a bouquet of wide-eyed balloons putting the swells in my sails

till one day i came across a band of yachts in a sleepy cove who were looking for something to compare themselves with and they pointed at my little red sail like it was drawn in busted crayon and started saying my poems weren’t serious enough or formal enough or full of subversions like hairy expostulations and started quoting the likes of Julia Kristeva and Foucault and Harold Bloom

it was then i opened my eyes to discover that each time i allow myself to dream and let my thoughts dance to their own misshapen music as if no one in the world is watching, i know what it is to be a vessel of life itself and not simply make commentary on it like those broke down yachts bloated by the winds of empty opinion who were doing nothing but thumbing their ascots in the breakwaters of their own perception

…and who from that angle could never see all the naked pains of living or the kind of god that has no mathematical center like the spark of a small universe that’s born in the beauty of every untamed thought and who, for all their big reasonable brains, never understood it’s a simple fact of life that too much looking leads to blindness