Sea Water, and Bone (2015)

Each year I mourn for you,
The mourning is slow, like a deep wave rising.
A rumbling in the sea; quake in the ocean floor
and from a monster’s too-full belly,
a wave of aching rising
from the deep-


where you are lodged in my gut
like a white bone. Piercing flesh and womb
and red uterus, swollen blood-boil.
And a long, slow mourning rises
from the hollow bowels of the sea;
echoes in tremors across the vapid land
and for a second, the electric sun
dims out against a watery sky-

short-circuit. Life flickers with the pain.
Loss is so static. Raising hairs on your arm;
the tiniest crackling
against salted skin. Love is so short, they said,
and oblivion so long. And each year you surface
from the deep and float, white and vulnerable,
silhouetted against
a despondent sky


Each year they remind me,
This was the day you were born-
they do not know that for demons
as well as angels and gods,
a human year is merely
one long unending night.




and still you swim inside me
your face turned upwards to an ungodly sky
rain beating down on your open eyes,
and the white bone turns clean as an ivory knife
the blood-boil about to
rupture.