the never-was sailor

standing on the deck, staring out over a calm sea, like eternal pancakes running forever to four horizons; hoisting the sails to bleed white in the sunset and carry wind in their palms; aching through the long lonely isolation of that enormous blue wilderness, that alien landscape, while my beard pokes further from my face and my heart hurts with the dull shock of longing; thirst floating on an ocean of undrinkable water; a triumphant return from far lands to my wife and children, and the rise up of that blood feeling like electric eels inside of me, ecstatic, before the old itch returns and i feel the pull of the sea once more; all the things i have never felt because my legs have never left land for long enough.