I never learned to surf.
And yet here I am swaddled in fathoms,
combing with pink, raw claws pawing through waves as I stammer
and suffocate,
gasping for air through waterlogged lungs,
flung from the warmth of the sand into the upper rungs
of pungent, furious foam and salt,
like brined blood bubbling up in my throat
like so much rubble,
you can only tread water for so long until your legs tell you
there's trouble and yet, Here I am,
panting,
pleading with the sea trying to float,
screaming to breathe, seething through salene teeth,
as time turns fleeting with release climbing up my kicking feet,
soaked,
over ten times over with no sign of a boat in sight,
my eyeline shows no one was right, but since no one can be wrong,
our collective reality is simply our sorrow's song,
ignoring the slamming whitecaps in our faces aching for relief
that never comes, even in tumultuous, fevered drowning,
whether innocent or guilty we are still simply sounding like
fish in an ocean's wake,
corpses rotted and rolling up to shore, as seagulls sickly cackle,
How many more spasms of air shall we struggle to take while the wake rakes against the napes
of our backs,
trying to wake up but the pressure goes slack,
looking for anything that could pull us back, but there's nothing,
There's nothing,
The land is on fire, the living are screaming in violent laughter,
and the ocean suddenly seems like the most comfortable tomb,
that I could ever hope to be buried in,
The womb of the planet, take me back to the dark, the wet, the void,
for it is a suitable place of rest for a man who never learned to surf,
who was found wanting by the bored and brutal,
may I find peace with the barrier reefs,
the acid purging my bones of my flesh, turning me into a calcified, barnacled
crucible worthy of discovery;
I never learned to surf.
