I think we are gonna be friends

“I am an island” as the songwriters say,
sitting alone on my ocean of blue carpet.
Cold, white light oozes in through large, foreboding windows
as I sit with my stuffed animals laid out in front of me.
Friends, family, fluffy pieces of comfortable surrender.

My isolation keeps me safe from the world crumbling around me,
like dirt clumping and rolling down a damp freshly dug ditch.
My island is safe and familiar.
The beat up and ragged mattress of a prison cell bed
or a pockmarked floor in a very small cage.
I know it left and right and my eyes feel every scratch as if they were etched into my own skin.

Eventually I discover people in the drive through window
of my red brick wall.
There’s a whole other world out there, full of smiling people
carrying around their own little cages and bumping into each other
because they have no idea that the other exists.

My stuffed animals lose their life,
and their glass eyes seem hopelessly empty.
I gather up my feelings
which I’ve laid out in front of me on my little island.
Happiness seems to have gotten lost somewhere in the sand.
That damn happiness, forget it. Whatever.
And I leave my island. Exit my cage. Jump through that window.

Or, at least,
I try

But, sometimes, it feels as if I were scattering sand
from my lonely beach
into the vast carpet ocean.