Sub Mare // Last Updated 27.July.2007

I totally stole the title from Ezra Pound, but I write nothing like him... so it's nothing more than hollow homage. Still rough and needing a better ending.

A sudden splash, and then, the brutal embrace
surrounds flesh and bone born to land.

All here is foreign—nothing but sand
so down deep; it is not underfoot
if it cannot be touched. That beasts scoot
along in the cold dark is a mystery.
This is unfamiliar territory—
the crash of waves and the tug out to sea—
for nothing here is known to you or me.
Nothing of the processes or systems
that maintain and rule this seeming wet desert
is in your head or in your heart.

Here, lost and floating, only the choppy
surface is noted. The sky, a color copy,
hits it at the seam of the world,
and there the threads stretch and bend.
These words will be lost, forever unpenned,
and sink down into the cold, cold, cold.

They say she is our mother, but she is old
and we are so long gone from her that she
has forgotten our fragilities and cannot see
her embrace can kill us, her love will
smother and choke--your body does she fill
with the utter immensity of her being.
Here are we, held down and only thinking
which way is which. We cannot see for
she is even in our eyes, and so the floor
could be this or that way. Her hands are gentle
even as our throats she does tug and strangle,
and we have no thought of resisting.
We have no thoughts at all beneath her twisting.
The whole of our existence is now
this death -- crushing and cold and slow.
Hidden in this seeming tragedy
is the shifting meaning of you and me
because all lovers know
you drown just as quick on land or sea.