Islands

I've spent another day asleep.

Numb to the world, to the cold.

The sirens and alarms drifted by as I slept,

never fully waking me. It's as if I'm on

a floating island, drifting aimlessly across the ocean.

Ships pass close, islands, continents too. Lately,

some of the islands seem impossibly far away.

I reach out with my arms and eyes, waving

and looking for someone to wave back.

But when we pass close together, when our islands meet,

a harbor is closed. A boat is leaking. The tide is low.

Something stands obstinately in the way. A stone sentinel,

reaching his hands into the ocean, declares that this too

shall not pass. That now is neither the time nor the place.

Then I must choose to fight the sentinel and lose,

or return to a solemn slumber and never win.

I must choose to rebel or to hope; to fight and die trying,

or to remain and gaze longingly at the horizon,

waiting for that island to come back into view.

So I slept, and each day when I wake,

I wave to my neighbor in the ocean beyond.

My neighbor waves back, and for a moment, we feel energy.

We feel a connection, a bond, even across the ocean's breadth.

But then the moment passes when the sentinel's hand once again

brings down a fog thick enough to sink a ship.

It conjures waves that could drown a continent, only to divide

two lonely islands.

And only to send them back to sleep for another fruitless dawn to come.