Thursday 13 June 2019

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.







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