Ink Ocean

I don't expect anyone to actually like this, but it should read interestingly. My last cut on my upcoming poetry album. In process, still to be finished, recorded, and so on.

[When I write, I am a wreck. Wonder if this long piece written thru interspersed months will pull together? I read aloud; crawl into a ball; write with my shaking bones.]

Ink Ocean


In the burning ocean. Where plumes drag through the world's gloom. Swoop of feathers, 

tarred. Or metal wings of dispersants. Gloss the rocks. You can't know where we go at 

night. Or why the morning shines. Or the glimmer of gold before sunset. Relentless tidal 

cycles. Let me tear at the crests and troughs. Go in. GO IN. Shiver. Sin. Dark water, grey 

clouds. A rain of black in falls from the sky. Drips. Rips, slashes the wet heaving page. 

Heat of sandpaper on fire. Burn the slick, salt water on fire. Coral crevices to hide. 

Grottos like vowels. That invite. Come in, why don't you. Open. Open. Open. Arms 

reach up. Seeds rain down. Wash the foam. Pray forests. Burning despair of illusion. 

Fruit of veils to burn in. Salt washes open eyes. Deltas fog. They said GO IN.
.

In the night, I covered the words. Ink sheets. Sheets of the net of ink. Even I couldn't 

read them anymore. I forgot the words, or they forgot me. Or I had to make them up 

when you asked. They washed up from the black ocean, those words. Spun out of black 

thread with black foam on a wave darkly. Ocean of words lapping on the beach,
reckoning.
.

Love isn't a silky bliss mist, more like the suture we sew our wounds with. The bloodied 

scapula-feathers of angels.
.

Language summons us to speak.

Speaking cascades from depths
like wells of water overflowing.

Water eats away at order, rivers
erode their banks, deltas silt.

Our words silt in the paddies
of time, flooded with being.
.

...the ocean
tempests, salt
waves seep
from the rug
under my feet...
.
This strange sea birdsong on love.
.
Coded words. Words that conceal what they reveal, that hide their message in plain sight. 

Invisible essence of the world. We are seeing what is invisible. The falling butterflies. 

Our hands full of snow. Or white feathers in the heat. What do we hide behind? What 

can we not forget? The way we perceive the lives we live are our realities.
Don't make it up.

When I lift the lip, water drops of me, my desk, the paper.

                                    The salt burns.
.

We could be stars burning through the night
     or phosphorescent fish glowing without starlight in the deep.

I am a fisherman of words, dragging my nets through your oceans, trawling your schools 
of lexicons.
.

Love is the twine that binds our bones together.

Let the cold water fill our eyes until we swim in vision every night.

Oil swirls, coating.
.

Under sheets of sea in the frozen Atlantic we found each other.

     You came in me like a wave of love.

          My heart dances crill.

Whalesong of life.

     Salt falls from feathers under this pen writing its words on the dark side of the moon 
in the abandoned ocean beds.


Wet, heaving page.

     Ink sheets.


Love is an aorta. A pounding surf of consonants like blood cells in the syrum falling from
rising wings.


It's a clash of shell, bone, hunger, physics, troughs and crests, blinding moments, the 
sight of psychics.


     Into. The explosion of who we are.
               Our oily words. Crashing waters.
          Choking the river streams. Fish bulging, dying.
     We eat the world.

We go out each night and net the catch. Clean up the mess. Retain memories. Under
our gold skin, arms flap like wings of waves.
.

Let me flow over you while you drown me.

     ...in your love. in your love. in your love...
.


The dream of us opens.

I fold the ocean over my head. Spy on our dreams. Within dreams we liquify. We are gone 

at night. Wings of sand on fire. The lovers' grotto, held together with crab claws, filament 

of gold feather shafts. Gilded ink. Love wakes
you every day. Into
your
   body, body
      of words. 

Seeping, lines of tar on the sands. 
Crumple the paper of wind.


Find darkness; bring it in. IN.


          An opencast poem, working from the exposed surface.

          Taking images from what appears.
.

we anchor in the swells.

we are sky, sun, moon, stars, wet kisses of wind, sailing birds, flying fish, glittering ocean


                    we are nothing


we will wash away
drops in the ocean
without memory

nets of words
dissolving

 knowing 
this strange song of 
love loves
through us...

love loves
through us...

love loves
through us...