Swallowed

When my font is bold and full I feel on-edge worse than

artless as though it were out of my hands

although it is I who write. In expressions of others

re-writ, in sound that has been well-produced

I sing along to in the vague hope of finding a tone – mine.

But really I give up swimming days on-end barely float

to await the uncertain swelling current I cannot want

but I surround myself I am me I am the sea

so who determines to carry myself to safety?

Even as legs stiffen to lead and the neck twists

to suck an ever chopped-up air whose unwanted

isolates mirroring dig into their side? Yet no glance

over one shoulder reviewing diluted appearances.

At some point it will seem very different to how

it seems now – that is the way of a point, it seems

twists things, and yet how many words unwind the spirit

that knows to express itself even in checks and balances

even if in doing so it may drown. There its truth

in moments meant for stealing, exposed, pain off the back

meant to be lost “with pleasure”, like tossing sheaves sun-glinted

from balconies up to hear the sound of something carried

like the body’s carried by limbs, like bones feathers air pockets,

so on pages that admit their dissolute expression

another denuding of selves; there its worth, it to fall

to be swallowed, to let cave in what would seem only light...

If I have thought about those words that pour

and the words that mock that they cannot,

about seekers’ and sought-afters’ and value-mongers’,

of all I read or heard my spirit kept a few alone, seeming

always from long ago to call dear whether they pour now or not

and running back, cloth at half-mast, stringers into water, water

into ocean, ocean to which I can only guess these rivers

run: this metaphor, this like, excuses what it cannot witness

would lock itself in with the sea itself and switch it on...

In all the blazing flood that engulfs my spirit, my word,

how could my word end in such comfort derelict?