Passion before Perfection

My second poem in The Other Press:


Titanic Thinking and a Body of Water

Squinting against one thousand suns
that are glinting from one,
reflecting in water murky enough to stand in.

It’s a wonder any light escapes its surface at all…

The wind arrives and begins its stylist ways,
transforming a perfect hair-do back to its primal state.
Walking through fine sand, in the midst of expelled plumage
and vacant crustaceanic condos,
conversation always seems to ebb away with the tide
and thoughts are drawn into the water,
like the debris that thought it was finally beached
but was caught up in the waves once more.
Doomed, or blessed
to continue drifting,
occasionally reaching a temporary shore
until it becomes so smoothed and refined
by a relentless surf
that it is nothing more than a grain of sand.
No different than the millions of others surrounding it,
just younger,
and they have neither time nor patience for their fellow captive.

Although this may have been the most brilliantly beautiful of stones,
now, as a speck amongst specks, it loses the distinctiveness it may have once had.
It awaits the time when the water will have its way with it once more
and it will be pounded into oblivion…

…looking out as the seagulls
coast along the coast…

The present shakes its way back into consciousness,
and it is pondered
that these are just fruitless thoughts
when one is standing next to a body
that goes a thousand times deeper than any human could.