Arts for the 21st Century

Archipelago

     skin has this… edge.


only a smidge more precise

        than the shores hemming these

                                      floating flecks of coral

                                             and cooled ash,

sentenced by tides to recline in the light

atomized and imprisoning.


What harsher colonizer of the mind

than distance?

What crueller slash than brothers made

into far-flung islands,

or love sarcasticized by lips

        thinned to blades? 


There is a lie repeated in the idyllic-ness of dusk

and a yawn of solemn understanding

               that follows with the night.


              Along the plainly marked truth of these separate worlds,


the lone islander toes exhaling waves

                                and stares for what seems an eternity

                            into an inner sea.


What else can be fished from such unfathomable depths,

but a glimpse of that cutting aloneness

                                    DNAed to islands?