The Waves

at my desk with all my loves circling around my head with toothy grins, mottled blue-black ripples all across their sharp calcium hides. There is a song here that I have forgotten and it goes like…

Here we lie in the valley of the deep

unblinking eyes staring upwards at the rippling azure that is the only sky that we will ever know

Surrounded by words that will remain unheard, trapped within the pages of what was never meant to be

We are the unmade past, the unfinished future, the blocks knocked over before we could build our fabled towers of babel

There’s a universe out there that can’t be traversed,

or we’ll end up in that hearse if we don’t do something first.

I have already killed myself with the longing for what I cannot be, so please, if you meet me on the road as if I were a Buddha, drown me.

And if you do, I’ll teach you about that sickly intoxication that burrows into your nerves and forces you to dance along to a melody that never ends

Let me teach you about the cliché of rhyming.

Underneath the veneer of all the fancy (curse) words in rhymed (verse) that lurks under our service to the surface

we’ll be graceful grateful little pirates sailing across the islands of what we secretly think we don’t care about but we do

I am struggling. It will never leave me, this scent of salt clinging to my eyes, crystallising my myriad obsessions so that when you finally crack my skull open maybe you’ll find something beautiful even if I cannot amount to anything.

And all the ages of history we will preserve under there. It will persevere.

We will look back on it and remember the times when we didn’t think that the flood and the storm were coming, when we stuck our heads in the sandy beaches and let the warm waves from all them icecaps slowly wash over us-

Be calm, my friends.

We can become silky salty selkies and slip off our human skins, and we can just lay back and accept that this is how it ends

(The white horse comes at the crest of every wave bringing pestilence and poison and pollution behind her hooves, and the seafoam cracked open from the sky won’t just melt into the beach like love but instead)

I remember now. I’m going to need a bigger boat.

Daaaaaa da, daaaaaa da, daaaaa da!