The Lost Boy

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How easily my little craft founders.


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A little weather, a stiff breeze, and she ships water over the gunnels and wallows in the troughs.


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I man the helm, but I lack grace at times. Too heavy-handed and impatient. Quick tempered. I can get her to point into the seas so she can ride it out till the weather calms, but I'm no sailor. Not one to speak of.





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I should be used to this up and down by now. Good day, bad night. Good night, bad day. Week. Month. Hour.


And I am. I am. It's good, it's fine, this motion, this constant bobbing around. I don't want to be a baby about it. My troubles are small and variable and just enough to put the taste of life into my ever hungry mouth. I really do love it all. I got a small compassion for myself that I can wrap around me like an old jacket. I know how to be my own friend. I can batten down the hatches, trim the sails, and mind my heading till things blow over.

Shit, I'll probably be grinning like an idiot in an hour.



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I got some stores set by. Friends like good old books to read in the night. A wife who holds the whole of the sea in her cupped hands, who traces the outline of my face with her fingertips in the dark, who in the final analysis simply loves me.


Loves me.


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I think that really what's happened is that all that artwork we saw yesterday has infected us. It was too powerful to bear, and we've both been knocked senseless by it. Yolie is nearly drowning in images and cutouts from her work on the sofa. She's thumbing through them, moving them around, overlapping them, cutting, placing. I can hear the voices of a thousand women coming out of her pores. I can see them standing over her.

I'm in much the same predicament.

Fevered.

Restless.




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My hands ache.

My eyes got grit in them.

My heart is hammering in my chest like a laboring pump trying to gush water out of the hold of a ship that is slowly sinking.


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I'll go down singing if I have to go down or I'll just
go on singing till dawn.



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I am a stubborn one.






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