You Don’t Only Live Twice

You Don’t Only Live Twice

You don’t only live twice,

It’s more delicate than that.

Infinite space is interiored

by the choices you made:

some willing, yet others wolf-cornered

like boxes inside little boxes,

balsa packing cases settled deep

in the cargo ship’s hold:

sabotage compass and chronometer;

fo'c'sle unbound for rolling horizons

absent, stabbed quartermaster flown

without leave or missing bosun’s call,

adrift the silent vessel falls

out of this world and into the other.

Don’t try to keep false lookout

shoreside, hushed callout any sort

of half recalled name;

whisper man overboard,

short haul wheel, starboard degrees

or divide port: it is all the same,

all in vain, he’s long left astern;

slipped quiet through the backdoor.

No cardboard speeches or gifts will do,

no thrown roses from the jetty,

no tremble touching of blue collar:

sad belayed after the fact,

breached and holed, negligence’s rift

sank him way forwards to the back;

twisted fast and far out of time.

Somewhere within memory mist

brief condensation coalesces

on thick tissue-glass portholes,

scour, rub swiftly, wipe it out,

close cover, defend against

the moistured fissures of excuse

on your land’s horizon. To point

your finger at yesterday’s turning tide

or swimming moon

is fat futile at best;

you laid that incarnation to rest,

in unquiet slumber

where now, every new-born waking minute

is hewn from firm decision

at your inconsiderate haste

to drown those seven soft seas to waste.

He is gone now. All of them are.

Plotted off planned predicted course;

that happens you know.

Every ship that sails is star tossed,

every sailor who leaves is lost

to land; must heaven-embrace cosmos

relatively, while you age,

stranded, becalmed, run aground,

left to seed, left to rage,

feeling your bones brittling

beyond all recognition, cursing

that all you safe-killed must live

within your phased mind

return on occasion, smile and forgive.

No.

We don’t only live twice.

Only a criminal would claim that

every gentle murdered sailor’s life

is a sextant fixed positioned mirror.

Look into that fragmented glass,

it is only you who see at last

wild roving seas offset static time;

landlocked, stagnant mind

where the two lives you live

 befit your crime.