The Perseverance of the Sunset Sea
2021, Senior, Poetry & Spoken Word
My mind, a weightless mangrove island,
my breath and heartbeat, slow as tides,
breaking to the beat of the sea on the shore.
My mortal chains the mangrove roots,
or bladderwrack, or a school of piranhas,
nipping away at my all-too-human flesh.
The sunset sea fills with me,
red blood tinting restless waves,
the water trailing moss and seaweed,
possessing me.
Bring me beyond reality
—but a river does not exist ever since
the steel beams, scorched trees, money green—
sail past this fumed life,
from groves of asphalt to raging ocean surf:
she runs through my blood,
racing against the pastures
and white heron angels
and the endless spray of spray of spray
from my fingertips, out like a wildflower.
I, moored to the fate of foam,
white caps, ascending souls
with salted blood and skin of sand and
immaculate reflections calling me home;
I see the bone-dry prairies sink
through blue lips, my old flesh and blood
on the horizon, like flotsam,
bobbing in the lub-dub cast-off relic ocean;
I take the intertidal filth as an omen,
lungs filling like bubbles with aqua slog,
kissed by the water and the sapphire sirens
and the ghosts that lie in the sea,
swallowed and licked like a dog,
gleaming saline.
I, the sunset sea, thermocline and oxygen,
a cauterized flame of toxic waste,
a rolling swell, a ravenous restoration;
I, the sunset sea, endlessly.