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To a Reader, Somewhere
by Michael Ferris
Your amplitude can frighten other folks:
you quest for meaning, like a fabled shore.
A handsome boy, salt-wet and rippled, stokes
the melancholy churning at your core.
You’re lonely in a crowd; when you’re alone
you know a harder, deeper kind of ache:
the longing for a heart cruel as your own,
to surge as one, as one to crest and break.
The prophets say the way to happiness
is turning from your savage, native Sun
and ebbing in the puddled shadows, just
as tide on chastened tide of men have done.
What’s happiness for them is not for you.
Rise up, then: you have wilder things to do.
Michael Ferris’s first true love was JS Bach. He has since had reckless affairs with Blaise Pascal, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost. He studied nothing of commercial value in college. He splits his time between Manhattan, where he renders unto Caesar, and Kingston, NY, where he confabulates with the hedgehogs and hummingbirds. He is grateful to have fallen on receptive ears recently at The Lyric, The Shit Creek Review, and Light Quarterly.
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