FictionPress.com - let the words flow
| FictionPress.com - let the words flow |
|
| Home Just In Communities Forums Beta Readers Dictionary Search | Login Register Extras |
"seaside town"
with no jury to decide my fate, hung up on faulty testimonies and teetering on debate.
i have the craving to be adventurous, the desire to set sail
not hung up on the muted legions of my lost brothers
under enemy fire and ruthless weather, or gone in the belly of the fabled white whale.
the currents- whose fabled remorse is take-no-prisoners
anonymous bodies bloated stacked in graveyards under an ocean blue
i do not dwell on past differences, it is not what i have been trained to do.
instead i must go and call upon foreign routes, to see myself about;
to educate myself of the carnage left, eternal ghost footprints on distant shores
my soles would not slip into the hallowed sand
when my fingers twist their fleshy resonance along metallic triggers
that do not manage to register their pitchy yells in comatose brain cells
long after the fact is nearly dust (boarded up in the attic, wreaking of must)
pieces of my guilt wrap themselves around the tomb of bars, birds
wriggling free to get home.
left to rot in the primordial mud- when they're cutting them up under brighter lights
bodies left for science's embrace, disjointed flesh and bloated thighs
the ungodly look on that poor old bastard's face!
similar to the forbidden tryst come upon midnight after a few impatient taps
at an innkeeper's door
salt is what they find in the sailor's teeth
begrudging, minutes later, flushing the hatred
dreaming of sweatered chastity pin-ups over his bed as he floats over
the latitude where forgotten u-boats drifted under, intersections that nobody seems to remember
(salt is found deposited hopelessly in their bones, inquiring anthropologists lift up from the bottom years
years years later.)
i went ahead and broke free
of the intolerable chains that weighed me down
chains nobody could see but me
kept me invested in this seaside town.
lofty dreamer on arabian nights-
i played the prince so many times, world-weary traveler,
soaring to previously unfathomable heights.
i kissed the pale hands of prepubescent queens.
i visited metaphorical meccas like you wouldn't believe
beyond the borders of your most panicked, mosaic’d dreams.
i met the minds that would change humanity
one by one, ever-so-tediously
i challenged authority like a lion with a stake and by morning
cleaned up enough to stand in the front pew of the church, closest to my troubled god.
and that was where i saw her, with these very eyes-
the stuff of all my boyhood fantasies realized, pure flesh and blood.
perhaps she had been the one sending me these signals, bouncing off the halls of angels
all along
telling me to get out and come rescue her
from the vestibules of her careful parents who thought her wrong, from the refines of that proper petticoat
and show her the map of the world
not to gloat, but only as
as only a cosmopolitan man such as i could lead a girl.
we ran away
so far away they could never no one could ever follow us
together on another ship set for more uncharted territory,
finding the history meant for us,
signaling the first of the new beginning for her and then the second for me
closest i was to ever settling down
- but keeping safe out of the greedy, ever-long clutches
of my old seaside town,
me and my bride.
at a time like that nobody needed a cry. nobody should have died.
if anything, beaming in our post-coital joy, we should have never been so alive.
there were wars, so many and then a tidal wave of disease
striking down the unfortunate in their battered leagues
looking back with an old man's scowl
that i thought i was immortal, delivering my child with the midwife's guidance
makes me writhe and howl.
a year, just a year
only after i departed my native shores,
on that odysseus-like search for something more
it came, panting for sweet blood and pantomimed gestures of "please, please, please"
the disease
our lives had only! just! begun!
but the cloaked figure of death listens to no one--
i discovered this the only way my immature mind would:
hard.
in the green church yard
that, out of my weakening system and vaporizing mind, i do not seem to tend
first i laid down my daughter
and her mother lies right beside her.
this never happened to me, and so i go on, i pretend.
i have returned from unfaithful journeys
where passion snatched the best of me
like a beggar taking money
from my slippery palms, who do i kid? it was never mine to begin with.
years have passed, and i am home at last
to find that nothing has really changed, despite the years
i have washed away with my sweat my spirit my tears.
my brothers were not so lucky, that unforgiving night when it was warm
under the crackling threat of that mid-summer storm.
children turn their sprightly cherub-heads away. they see my sins,
the grizzled gray hairs uneven on my chin.
it seems that i would forget but sometimes i imagine it being her.
the seaside
it seems that my wings have been plucked, the rule i defied
only came back as i shied
from poseidon, though, i'd never have to hide--
taking his nymph in my arms as my final bride.
i scream now, as if they will hear anyhow! -
the dreams of fair-haired young men
jaundiced into despair
with a shrug of the shoulders, as if to say that they'll never care
- and where the wind brings them, well,
that's where.
i stand erect on the wet morning grass
bringing to memory all the things that have come to pass
the ships come in, one by one
history is cyclical. how did i achieve peace for the world when there was no peace in my nomadic heart?
i am dying, ashen and elderly and unclaimed for by heaven or hell, i have fallen apart.
not glancing down, my arms outstretched,
it seems i have never truly departed from my bitterly-beloved seaside town;
like the rest i simply offered my best
until there was nothing, nothing anymore. i take the coward's leap and i soar.