A tragedy of waves and stone. Two bodies crushed to a single flour.
In the distance, you loomed immensely, in constant hypnotic sway, sparkling blue with deep dark spots for eyes, and your horizons were endlessly wrapped in the faraway fogs of soaring dragons and arcane lighthouses. Though old as you were (but fresh as you looked), the children knew you, and they'd scurry back and forth along your shores, giggling as you tickled them in your game of touch-and-go, like a spirit of the womb nipping at their ankles. Nearby, their parents lay outstretched on towels, removed from the action, lax in the blanket heat of a lazy sun, but every so often they'd awaken alert and cast a sudden vigilant glance towards the churning waters, to check for any familiar bathing suits that may be thrashing in peril. Soon, the sun would apply its invisible weight to their drowsy lids and they would slowly drift back to their royal slumber of fanning palms, perfumed linens, of fat juicy grapes lowered into wanton mouths in the pacific hiss and lull of your white-froth whisperings. The little boys and girls romped in the shallows and unknowingly did enter and exit their parents' afternoon dreams, the old haunts, as their guardians torpidly slipped in and out of that sad adult sleep. The children had once been pleasant notions jetting inside those dreams, figments of a forgotten dreamscape of the makers, darling wonders captured and carnalized.
A few of the smaller children held back; they were timid, reluctant to play with you. They thought you a strange new bully, one with delightfully wild and fun intentions, but one that was also unaware of its own hulking size and careless might. You didn't know it, then, but you played too rough sometimes, and one wrong move could prove disastrous. A force of nature, they feared! They clutched their plastic shovels and pails to their hearts and sat with their feet buried in mounds of patted sand, wiggling their toes in the cool, deep in. They watched intently as the others played gaily with you and each other, with the keenest of squinting eyes, lightly frowning, but daring never to enter. Oh, but your presence was enough to nurture possibility and promote freedom, and their self-imposed restrictions would cause their lonely minds to privately boil and to harness your energy, to rub and spark an imaginative wildfire and perpetrate some amusements of their own. Most of them would get antsy, run around in circles, kick a ball around, toss a frisbee; some would catch the artistic bug to create and take to the ground to fashion works of sand, like tortoises, sandmen, hamlets, castles with moats. They would busy themselves, like mad scientists, with sculpting ephemeral fantasies and miniature worlds, out of the sand which you'd make malleable, dampened by your kiss.
I had come to stand before your edge, being under the impression that you've always winked at me from afar and were anxious to receive me. Here I wavered, a burning spec, clothes wretched and stiff like scabs, irritable sand in the shoes I never thought to remove, at the very end of the land which had held me erect in space for all these years and proceeded to unroll and retire into you. I wished to surrender my form as the earth does, to indulge in the insanity of your secret movements within, but I am small, stubborn, and flesh, whereas your epic whims gladly stretch and foam for miles, for countless heroes and villains alike. You are a dangerous acquaintance and a deadly thing in which to lose myself. However, I would winced to look backward, then. It simply wasn't an option. A well-known multitude of obstinate boredoms, simple everyday tortures, and tiny excruciating deaths lurked in armies behind me, waiting, sneering and salivating for my return. I wanted to present myself to you as an honest man, who bore an unfortunate record of being loved fruitlessly by many women, in desperate need of being splashed awake, to shake the dotage, this wandering trance.
I felt so heavy of body and maybe I stuck out in odd places that I couldn't myself see.
You unleashed your gaze upon me as a shock of streams, a charging rush of nuzzlings, from all sides, thousands of gentle licks per second as a single force of savage matter, and the quick, thick embrace of the living liquid surprised me, surrounded and conquered my skin, tingled the tiny hairs on my legs that, partly submerged, now swayed with your every changing thought. The wind gasped with me as I was flanked at the calves and knees by the encompassing clutch of your coldness. You were freezing me this evening, but worse would be the moments you'd recede, the shivering intervals without you! I walked into you, nonetheless, thirsting to float in the mystic warmth of your centre. On the path, the ground dissolved in chunks and you softened the sand beneath my feet. I sunk a few inches with every step, in which I rose in and out of you, in-out, up and down, on your trail of grainy pudding, on your pavement of veils, as I paced and pulled towards your hidden chambers. Closer and closer, closing in, with such growing inconsistencies at foot, my balance grew more and more skewed, and lines, rules, borders, gravity, all thankfully conceded to your motions. It is in such a way that my mind reels, my stomach sinks, and my heart loses its earthly configurations for an ineffably divine auto-pilot, in the presence of love.
You were much too much.
I couldn't wait. I knelt to have you; a small part of the whole, but a formidable portion, yet. You covered me, slapped me, stole my breath, closed my eyes, tempered me with treatments of ice and withdrawal, while roughly accomodating my sunken groove of a nest. You pulled away rhythmically and plundered continuously, powered by the bosom of planets.
I became numb with this new foreign pleasure. My senses were bared and consumed by you and your actions. My ears were taxed with loud frenzied sounds that came and left. I opened my salty eyes to a bright and blurred world and my nose inhaled wetness, breathed in the stinging marine. This was a lovely encapsulated bliss and a return to exquisite fragility; I hardly knew it. What seemed like a bunch of raw discomforts, I felt, ultimately, as an excessively good and perfect way of being, one that could not be denied, perhaps having indefinite origins in my vaulted state as a joyous embryo, when happiness was not defined in human terms, when evil was a rumor, and my inchoate eyes were as big as my body.
I hardly knew you.
A first crack of lightning signaled a tempest, a reckoning, alarum. I was snapped out of it and crawled back instinctually. I tried to reason against the change, but to no avail; your nature dwarfs me and I'm a gentleman of sorts. You turned sly and murky, with no provocation on my part; I dealt with it. I was aware of your vacillations, your unpredictable fits and episodes, through steady observation and sketchy hearsay, but no one never thinks that today will be the day they will be driven out by your dark ominous waters. I was alone in this place, discarded, fit to drown, and in danger of being forgotten.
You were still washing over me when you flashed your stormy adieux. I felt you lingering all around, dripping from every exposed part of me. The bad weather had struck beyond my control, and miserably, I was forced to retreat. I stood up with a few old burdens strapped still to my spine, some that I intended to leave behind, and you lapped frolicsome at the knees and heels of my sad departure. You flow unceasingly without me and I become dry as a husk in recollection ... but I remain your noble loving trespasser.
It's been weeks, you realize! You want me to write about you, and in the context of SOLELY YOU, but you gotta understand ... I like to write with a large degree of presence still intact, when the wave has just beaten me and pulls me in deeper, when my head is submerged and shaken with seawater, perfectly conquered and infiltrated! See, the story would begin to take shape as I withdraw from the whole, a bit on the shore, as I fall back, confidently, on our moist bed of shifting sand, and there, the exhausted poet-in-me's final ruminations will struggle to procure a fit ending, the tide still sweetly at my sides!
Here's the short entry I promised you. I made you an ocean.
A few of the smaller children held back; they were timid, reluctant to play with you. They thought you a strange new bully, one with delightfully wild and fun intentions, but one that was also unaware of its own hulking size and careless might. You didn't know it, then, but you played too rough sometimes, and one wrong move could prove disastrous. A force of nature, they feared! They clutched their plastic shovels and pails to their hearts and sat with their feet buried in mounds of patted sand, wiggling their toes in the cool, deep in. They watched intently as the others played gaily with you and each other, with the keenest of squinting eyes, lightly frowning, but daring never to enter. Oh, but your presence was enough to nurture possibility and promote freedom, and their self-imposed restrictions would cause their lonely minds to privately boil and to harness your energy, to rub and spark an imaginative wildfire and perpetrate some amusements of their own. Most of them would get antsy, run around in circles, kick a ball around, toss a frisbee; some would catch the artistic bug to create and take to the ground to fashion works of sand, like tortoises, sandmen, hamlets, castles with moats. They would busy themselves, like mad scientists, with sculpting ephemeral fantasies and miniature worlds, out of the sand which you'd make malleable, dampened by your kiss.
I had come to stand before your edge, being under the impression that you've always winked at me from afar and were anxious to receive me. Here I wavered, a burning spec, clothes wretched and stiff like scabs, irritable sand in the shoes I never thought to remove, at the very end of the land which had held me erect in space for all these years and proceeded to unroll and retire into you. I wished to surrender my form as the earth does, to indulge in the insanity of your secret movements within, but I am small, stubborn, and flesh, whereas your epic whims gladly stretch and foam for miles, for countless heroes and villains alike. You are a dangerous acquaintance and a deadly thing in which to lose myself. However, I would winced to look backward, then. It simply wasn't an option. A well-known multitude of obstinate boredoms, simple everyday tortures, and tiny excruciating deaths lurked in armies behind me, waiting, sneering and salivating for my return. I wanted to present myself to you as an honest man, who bore an unfortunate record of being loved fruitlessly by many women, in desperate need of being splashed awake, to shake the dotage, this wandering trance.
I felt so heavy of body and maybe I stuck out in odd places that I couldn't myself see.
You unleashed your gaze upon me as a shock of streams, a charging rush of nuzzlings, from all sides, thousands of gentle licks per second as a single force of savage matter, and the quick, thick embrace of the living liquid surprised me, surrounded and conquered my skin, tingled the tiny hairs on my legs that, partly submerged, now swayed with your every changing thought. The wind gasped with me as I was flanked at the calves and knees by the encompassing clutch of your coldness. You were freezing me this evening, but worse would be the moments you'd recede, the shivering intervals without you! I walked into you, nonetheless, thirsting to float in the mystic warmth of your centre. On the path, the ground dissolved in chunks and you softened the sand beneath my feet. I sunk a few inches with every step, in which I rose in and out of you, in-out, up and down, on your trail of grainy pudding, on your pavement of veils, as I paced and pulled towards your hidden chambers. Closer and closer, closing in, with such growing inconsistencies at foot, my balance grew more and more skewed, and lines, rules, borders, gravity, all thankfully conceded to your motions. It is in such a way that my mind reels, my stomach sinks, and my heart loses its earthly configurations for an ineffably divine auto-pilot, in the presence of love.
You were much too much.
I couldn't wait. I knelt to have you; a small part of the whole, but a formidable portion, yet. You covered me, slapped me, stole my breath, closed my eyes, tempered me with treatments of ice and withdrawal, while roughly accomodating my sunken groove of a nest. You pulled away rhythmically and plundered continuously, powered by the bosom of planets.
I became numb with this new foreign pleasure. My senses were bared and consumed by you and your actions. My ears were taxed with loud frenzied sounds that came and left. I opened my salty eyes to a bright and blurred world and my nose inhaled wetness, breathed in the stinging marine. This was a lovely encapsulated bliss and a return to exquisite fragility; I hardly knew it. What seemed like a bunch of raw discomforts, I felt, ultimately, as an excessively good and perfect way of being, one that could not be denied, perhaps having indefinite origins in my vaulted state as a joyous embryo, when happiness was not defined in human terms, when evil was a rumor, and my inchoate eyes were as big as my body.
I hardly knew you.
A first crack of lightning signaled a tempest, a reckoning, alarum. I was snapped out of it and crawled back instinctually. I tried to reason against the change, but to no avail; your nature dwarfs me and I'm a gentleman of sorts. You turned sly and murky, with no provocation on my part; I dealt with it. I was aware of your vacillations, your unpredictable fits and episodes, through steady observation and sketchy hearsay, but no one never thinks that today will be the day they will be driven out by your dark ominous waters. I was alone in this place, discarded, fit to drown, and in danger of being forgotten.
You were still washing over me when you flashed your stormy adieux. I felt you lingering all around, dripping from every exposed part of me. The bad weather had struck beyond my control, and miserably, I was forced to retreat. I stood up with a few old burdens strapped still to my spine, some that I intended to leave behind, and you lapped frolicsome at the knees and heels of my sad departure. You flow unceasingly without me and I become dry as a husk in recollection ... but I remain your noble loving trespasser.
It's been weeks, you realize! You want me to write about you, and in the context of SOLELY YOU, but you gotta understand ... I like to write with a large degree of presence still intact, when the wave has just beaten me and pulls me in deeper, when my head is submerged and shaken with seawater, perfectly conquered and infiltrated! See, the story would begin to take shape as I withdraw from the whole, a bit on the shore, as I fall back, confidently, on our moist bed of shifting sand, and there, the exhausted poet-in-me's final ruminations will struggle to procure a fit ending, the tide still sweetly at my sides!
Here's the short entry I promised you. I made you an ocean.