Orcas Island

This feels old, but I just never got around to posting it, because it is a poem to be read aloud. People have called it the "Feral" poem, but it is called, "Orcas Island".

There is a boy, my age, in hiding
somewhere amongst the forests of orcas island.
The police call him the feral child
The reporters call him the Plane Thief
and the mothers from his old neighborhood call him crazy.
But he’s my Baby
but Lady Lady Lady
they shake her
where did you go wrong?

He was twelve the first time he got caught hands throbbing
he caught fever in his veins
until his fingertips swelled
called his mom sobbing
And although he’d been caught red-handed
he’d felt something itching in his bones,
a feeling coming outta his amygdyla you know that beautiful part of your brain that
swells up and makes you feel things
And since then he’s been trying to hold on to that sensation,
some call it love
some call it fear
some call it an outlaw.

He leaves chalk outlines of his footprints when he robs grocery stores
He leaves policemen notes taped to their front-doors,
when your grandparents are at church he is climbing past their venetian blinds
copying down their credit card numbers
he’s not scared of Thunder
He out-raced a policeman’s engine in a car chase
he’s been known to order pizza to the edge of a forest
because he gets hungry
He moves around by plane,
he learned how to fly them by reading an internet file
of an aeroplane’s manual but he never learned how to land them
so he usually has to crash them and then run.

Everyday I read about him in the corners of newspapers
and I want to find him
I want to chase that sensation
the mothers call love, the reporters call fear and the police say it should be outlawed
whatever it is that they’re trying to handcuff
but I know we’ve all felt it
maybe it’s hiding under your bed
disguised as a bottle of gin
maybe it’s the cigarette you roll in your father’s kitchen
maybe nobody can feel it anywhere
except for in the swollen red fingers of and outlaw

so I read about him
and I want to join him in that dense forest
where no one can catch him
I want to tell him
it isn’t criminal what he’s doing
I want to tell him he’s brave
he has looked the law in the face
and they still can’t shoot him dead
and he’s young and he’s living
and this boy stands for what most of us prefer to hide under our beds
he means that I may as well be dead if I leave my dreams on my pillow every morning

There is a boy, my age, in hiding,
somewhere amongst the forests of orcas island
He was twelve the first time he got caught
and since then he’s been running trying to hold on to that sensation.
Some call him the feral child, some call him the plane thief, and some call him crazy
But if I ever met him I’d tell him he’s brave
and I know when he shuts his eyes he sees gold, he sees all the sky he’s left behind, imagine
flying, and he is wild and he knows it and he doesn’t repress it
And even though he doesn’t have shoes, he has more than us
He can see the beauty in the river passing through and he can hear the music in the branches of
trees
and maybe you don’t care much for the feeling he’s chasing
and maybe you’d call him Crazy
but he has Dreams
When he shuts his eyes he sees a river
and when he opens them
all he’s got is his name
He is an outlaw, with red hands and no shoes.