What have we to measure the distance we are
from the sea or albatross? Breakers and barriers
of islands or broken pieces of offshore reef
buoys of orange balsa wood bouncing
a deathly white albino alabaster
suffocating adrift of their environment.
The truth never lasting as long as it should
freeing us to dream, follow the map, its lines
geographies; on the flood plains, the heights
of magnificent mountains, chasms
and crevices for exploration, the lines
for rented rooms to savor some sort
of companionship longer yesterday
than the brevity of its nanosecond.
Marking the distances we can’t measure
how far we may need to wander to avoid
the bottom of the river Ouse*, finding
an inner sanctum of belonging
telling us we’ve arrived at this moment
free of all but the ties that bind us
to the sorrow in our voices and the home
God has shown us how to find
at this hour precisely—revelations
well-storied and meant to be found
celebrated and, sometimes, anguished over.
*Apologies to her and her family, yet in dedication to Virginia Woolf. Her streams of consciousness began to unlock to the literary, and unliterary world, the emotion of the mental illness that pained her, and has pained so many including my own family
Skinner Matthews is a poet living and writing in Bluffton SC. He writes for the enlightenment, and with an informed knowledge, of the struggling lower, working class, and the disaffected. He hopes his poetry brings light to the many umbrous hearts and places that exist as landmines in the streets, neighborhoods, and households of the working class.