Free to Drown

Oh my pilot,
       take me to plight and engage me with hell’s fury,
       natural and calmly carried
       by leviathan proportion, gloomy sea deep repeat.
You who draw me forth ~ a sunken, clam-like cause
       holds me up
       and floats me rough but live.

Rise up and spring-bound your salt-stained curse
       to preserve a mark of monomania
       on my burnt-out ship.
Wreck, scatter and tow my entrails
       from my flotsam feather.
Splinter my bearer’s gift of sanctity,
       to pierce my very life skull.
Enter with malice, benign to face, and twist a thumb to turn
       in a coiling vengeance spleen
       that sinks the coin, my bag of brass.

Thoughts I’d shudder from hell-fires within
       and wave with kindred spirits
Welling up like oceanic tears in stillness ungained,
       and breaking hard with repentance, hardly due . . .

Stealing me
                   down,
                              down            and away,
       intoxicated to my brim,
       with eagerness planted to be glad
       of what-could-be-worse
       in my cut-loose       ship;
Spotting broken wrecks of mine on the mercury sky above
       ~ once my sea! ~
       and evincing little cares I once told myself nervously,
       hatching in my seaweed cracking pod
       a sickly fluid of missive half-fears (regretful, no);
Stabbing no heart of mine with pangs of guilt,
       foaming outward for fetch-me swords unbound,
       to cut taught danger ties
       in my hydrofoiled brain . . .

To sharpen an instinct to survive
       a lastly hunt
       with dear life set down
       and barrelled oil of gratification set high above:
       the standard bearer who guided and raped me
       and hardly allowed me to fall below its wake.

Oh my pilot, I’m free to drown
to liquefy in breath and water my blood
with folly and
                   sunken grief,
to follow your prey to purgatory ~
in any case it shall drag me down

In any case it shall drag me down.