My love for you is an ocean,
fathomless fathoms
of blue black sea,
but if my love is an ocean,
you are a shore of crags.
You are a snuffed out lighthouse,
a vacant tower on a beach
of rocks, lightless and hushed.
You cast out no warning
that I should not sail near.
You shipwreck me.
You claw my hull open
on the sharp corpses
of dead coral, on shark’s teeth,
on the glass knives of obsidian
islands belched up in smoke
from the volcanic deep.
All my treasures have spilled out
into your treacherous shallows,
swallowed by surf and tide,
to sink and whirl in the eddies
among the hulks of others
who ran aground you before me.
My love for you is an ocean,
and you have a mad captain’s graveyard
where it meets the earth of you.
This poem was originally published under the pen name Gabriel Gadfly.
