Archive
07/09/08 - (2)
Gulliver Casts Back
Once upon several daring, insouciant, long-ago journeys To the hinterlands of my innocent soul, I set out from the Downs, in my Gulliver disguise,
Leaving behind my landlocked hometown, Heading in God-only-knew-what directions, Across unchartered oceans, toward unimagined flying islands,
Strange regions populated with diminutives and giants, Hostile and benign aborigines, queens and kings, Equines of other stripes, humanlike, if more odious, yahoos,
Geniuses and idiots, inventors and universal deconstructionists, Royal Academicians and disreputable projectors, Creators of specious treatises, tracts, tomes ancient and modern.
Oh, for those devil-may-care sea seasons, When my spirit surged, under full sail, against convention's winds, Licked the salt off its lips, with a pulsating heart
And a gleam in its impish, mischievous, iconoclastic mind, Casting a visionary eye toward orange full moons — Those omens of all things possible and alive and ripe for love.
Aye, matey! That was a time of vibrancy and pluck, Of youth's grand naiveté, vitality, wanderlust, When impossibility was within possibility's reach,
Nothing was a breach of protocol, imagination, faith, And fantasy was a young sailor's best bunkmate, The most dependable crew member a loose cannon could ask for,
On his voyages to the edges of Earth's watery parts, Whose elements consisted of spouts, hurricanes, Atolls, archipelagos perpetually on fire, abandoned land masses,
Remote nations named, arcanely, Glubbdubdrib, Balnibarbi, Lilliput, Lagado, Luggnagg, Laputa, Brobdingnag, Blefuscu, Houyhnhnmland, Japan.
Now, after four unqualifiedly, fascinatingly disastrous voyages, Having added, to my aging intellect, considerable data as well as detritus, I'm home, again, to my submissive wife, my two grown kids,
Decidedly wiser, if not appreciably more flexible To changes in climate, temper, tonality, texture, emotion, loneliness, Happy, nonetheless, to be dry-docked, in Redriff, Nottinghamshire,
Eking out my meager retirement, where I was born, Recollecting my more reckless adventures, When I intrepidly tested the waters of my vessel's meanderings,
Among peoples altogether foreign, strange, peculiar, curious, Who invited me to taste of their idiosyncratic ways, That I might die enlightened, inspired by their atrociousness.
07/09/08 - (2)
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