Feels like the right way to kick off the week, return to editing and revising the new poems and my novel.  I’ve been preoccupied with music and the recording process. Life is a balancing act, isn’t it.

This one is inspired by the ocean of course. I tend to take it for granted and living in East Van fools me into forgetting that it’s just beyond those buildings across the street. Conceived on the Atlantic and raised by the Pacific, I am steeped in its depths.

AN OCEAN IN THE HARPOON

Scattered as if a thundercloud
of savage Eden roses,
exquisitely sultry, she draws
admiration from reptilian denizens,

stares into shark eyes,
tapetum lucidum gleaming,
until their fins turn yellow
and their jaws relax,
a guttural engine driving her
to swim in circles, seeking
a channel red enough
to lead her home.

Mononymous chatterati discuss
the metamorphosis from fingerling to cetean,
her voice, the colour of salt,
as beguiling as a ship on the horizon,

its windows reeking of hell,
a colossal compass within,
vast enough to claim
the hemisphere’s islands of flesh.

Instinctively she steers away,
a creature of the depths,
swept along
towards the time to come,
its heady essence, flames of tide,
urban lighthouses guiding her return.