alike with ships
( circa 1996 )

I lay in bed like a ship, wrecked upon the rocky shore of human words and concerns when the doorbell rang like a tiny golden needle thrust through a beautiful balloon. “Honey, it’s the ghost, he says you better get up.” I sighed, wishing to be deaf. “Tell him I’ve had enough candy to fill two praetorian armies and I am waiting for my bed to crack like an egg and release me into delicate fogs filled with floating colors.” My hull was spilling bushels of soft mirrors into the vicious surf as blue gulls twirled above, fascinated to see the sky shifting below them; broken silvery clouds. “He says that your engine has turned into a lobster which is hungry and angry and spilling red revenge along the roads and he doesn’t care about candy.” I buried myself a little deeper in the sandy shallows, rocking slightly with the motions of the surf, trying to escape from the headless knife beings which suddenly filed onto the shore from the nearby edge of a riotous jungle. “Tell him that my lies are my only protection from the hornets of doubt, which hover threateningly at my window, tapping their spiny legs against the glass with those angry, inhuman faces leering into every room in my house!” He rushed into my room then, like a blue tornado carrying the husks and flowers it had snatched from the stable surfaces of earth in its long travels. Dust vorticed up from the bookshelves, papers and pencils leapt up from their places and began to dance. I could see his single eye, glowing and piercing me with deadly compassion. He stood twirling in my suddenly silent room. “It’s time for breakfast,” he said, “I’ve come a long way through years of towns and peoples and I don’t like to eat by myself.” I thought I made out a small tear forming in his eye. A storm brewed above the beach, threatening lightning as my masts tilted over finally to blanket themselves in the brine. “Alright,” I replied, “I’ll get up and we’ll go have some pancakes, how’s that?” “Pancakes?,” his single eyes seemed suddenly childlike and joyful, “I love pancakes!…with fruit?” He began to twirl and bounce around the room. “Yep. With fruit!” From the wreckage of the ship rose the ghost of the ship, floating perfectly again, sails filling and heading away from the shore, back to the familiarity of the vast blue blanket whose wrinkles were its favorite song.