the hungry must go sailing
there’s something asleep in the river bed
buried under the ripples and you might just see it
if you’re game enough
to lean over the bank. see, that’s
the way it is with me, standing at the water’s edge;
and maybe the dirt is soft, and maybe i’ll fall in,
and maybe whatever’s in there bites.
ambition is a little girl with twin braids done at the nape,
hunched over a writing desk. her pen can’t
keep up with her mind because
she writes like she’s running but she thinks like she’s flying
and something about the artificial yellow light
of her desk lamp makes her eyes
feel soft. and something about the next empty page
makes her wastepaper basket look hungry.
and her letters are barely
staying afloat above the blue ruled lines.
here’s the thing: if you’re alone on a boat
and you topple over the edge and go sinking
then there’s no one left in the boat to yell “man overboard!”
some people go sailing just for that:
the small space between the leap and the fall
where no one owes you anything,
and you feel your own desperation, no one else’s,
and all you see is blue.
anyway, can’t you tell it’s not about the crudeness of giving up,
it’s about the kid in the navy blue skorts who
played along with the others for scraps of love
and never cried over
her maths homework, except for expanding brackets.
sometimes it’s even about the soft river bank,
or the drowning cursive, or the
wastepaper basket that’s eaten its fill.
it’s about how dry land is tempting but the hungry
must go sailing.