While reading Half in Love by Linda Gray Sexton I found myself remembering how I used to write poetry. Lots of poetry. I barely do anymore. It’s almost like that was a different person, that poetry writing girl. Looking through an old notebook I found this. It’s an early draft of something I never finished. I read it now and think that it’s a bit corny in parts but I like it. I thought that it was an interesting snapshot of me almost exactly 20 years ago.
Untitled – 2/26/91
I have lived far from the water for too long. I wish to be touched by the ocean. Its cold green smile forcing my lips to a blue grin of muscles gently aching. To smell the wind in my skin, amidst the stony salted patterns, like tracks of millipedes. My eyes will ignore the lesser colors, seduced by electric fish scales, (sea greens) and rich sky.
I wish to be slapped by waves, awoken from my slumberous thoughts and their dry results. My dry brain creaks in its casing. Fossil ideas stick in my throat. How I thirst for salt water, our parent fluid. I suck on pieces of shell, its smooth skin smooth on my tongue. Searching for the taste. The taste of God.
At one time, I wanted to breathe the water without help of gills, the ocean floor, unaware of silent light straining down to touch my face. I wanted to be dreaming coral, home for fishes, deep rooted, unmoving yet secretly alive. Buried underwater. My million fingers gripping, gripping the sand.
Standing on the beach, waves bury my feet under sand. The surface like the glistening skin of a seamless shark, and I am planted upon her back. We are feeding and I have yet to have my fill. Beaten by a wave, I’m thrown upon the beach. Tasting the sand in my mouth, in my hair, in my eyes, in my crotch. Its roughness is so lovely. And I turn to crawl back into the tide again.