I stand captain of my ship with my crew dependent on me. The Prince; broken. The old man with a leaden tongue. The musician with her harp strings cut and her voice lost. They look at me with the belief. Yet as I turn the wheel the waves do not turn.
I reach for my sextant, my measurement, my last refuge of sanity. I turn it to the sun, to God’s blazing eye. My shades melt, my mirrors shatter and my eye is blind.
In desperate fever I look at the total sky, at the stars that have seen man grow from nothing; that have watched empires rise and fall; that will have always been.
The stars are a miasma of colors. They grow and shrink. They texture. They marbelise. They laugh at my inception. I am dumbstruck, lost, heartbroken at the first sin.
I run to throw myself overboard. At the railing, I am relentlessly mocked by the cruel changing of an unjust ocean. It laughs, becoming flowing cement, gelatinous oil, sweet honey.
And I know, I weep. I prostrate myself before you in desperate vanity. In the hope that this one time, the wailing of the child will break through.
The silence envelopes me, it caresses and soothes me. Because within I know that there is still time to dance.
And now the laughter comes sweet and glorious in its cruelty. The buddha waves, joining in. And now I know with certainty that we are here to get the joke.
By Miles Bloom, student
