This road is the road of my death.
I stood motionless in its lucid waters
Where parallel to the ocean
I speared a neon fish.
He admonished me with a fossilising
Shock of ages, waged in his eyes
Which were tiny, glaucous opals.
He once danced and shone
In shoals unknowable as stars.
I am opposed to my own taxidermy.
Standing in the sea leaves me thirsty.
The sky is perforated by jars
For storing a catch which is ours.
Lobsters, swordfish, octopus hearts,
Once the muscle is stopped
It’s almost impossible to restart.
I witnessed it only once, as a boy,
And mythology claimed it for herself.
How far we had journeyed.
I envisioned my existence
With gulls and oppressive seasalt air
Which stripped the elders of teeth
And their ability to remain human,
Their silence as fragile as chalk,
And it corroded all moments
And customs, the colours of
Spring summoned in my lover’s hair,
The jigs of tradition around
A pole each townsmen bore
To the beach with such gravitas
Commensurate only to their souls;
The saline air froze time,
Woven into their hair, banded
Together like a comet’s tail,
Like the spawn of the golden eels
Which are reeled in by fishermen
With the sun tattooed into
Their ganseys. I too will be spry
And fry, live and die,
There is nothing starker.
For now, I arrive and I cry
Behind my steering wheel,
A harpoon through my hope,
Ego skewered by a dart
Outside an unlit supermarket.
