Sailors always get the cheap lobster rolls.
The knock-about face of the traipsed and tripping up on something solid, the stronger knot tied tight. Behind this weather was cause for concern, the captain notes. There is the further out, but no time to ferry across. The water is all sliding down, and lurching towards the waves, desperate, they’re crashing now, they’ve stopped now, they’ve gone out, dead out.
When asked for a bid, he paused long enough not to be noticed.
Why not spit thank you at the heft and the boat and the lot of it. But it was never announced in the newspaper. Was never brought to a quarter of the attention. Right now it is important to slip delicately into the possible of the moment, tighten and wreck that hole, frighten the girly boys. Fine, play it cagey. The body that lies between hip and neck and it turns over and you’re better at it now, like that, you play it as it lays like an old accordion, the music kinda campy, and barely French. Mounted me and made a difference but now I can’t remember details so well. Oh well, there are plenty of them about and new ones come along quickly.
I had a dream last night where along the water there was a pacing clear as sleep and that rested notion made documentaries of buildings gone and there were no buildings out at sea there were fish coves and dancing and the whores bled silly all on the same cycle they were where we were we held one another tossing dice and the clumsy but cruel antics of Marlow meant we were getting dirty tonight what the gun actually wants every day is to just be held and we were holding one another and no city port to pour us out onto no recourse of course the night darkens and the water glows green in moon light and our fathers told us we would not freeze in our bed alone that we should get out get out and go back to bed the bed down the hallway so dark but mothers know better how she embroiders her existence into our pants and the moons shadow passes over the other way the way you look tonight and the telephone red he said holds out to place a call down the hall calling back calling you back to the deck a moonlit spire of oak and tide and the way it all sounds is dark water and that fish said you were the one she always expected would act this way out of all the fish in the world
The sold ones come quicker, they say, so you get your money’s worth. All up until closing time.
--You know what I like?
--Tailor his cock.
--I wrote it, I suppose you could.
--In his arms.
--You’re very much aware though, aren’t you?
--It isn’t true.
--Not, you know, whatever you’d like.
--Those shoulders, curls, capable boys.
--Why?
--The rotten place, the-
--Mud pond.
--Plenty of guys like losing.
The status of the sea was a watershed moment for me. Clean-shaven with a tip of the hat, it all rolls into itself and back out again. The context of war. The various dangers of the calm, the relaxing rolling of waves. The movement and the rest. Some moments of silence and a few cigarette butts tossed aside as fish bait. I grew up loving smoked-up salmon, but now I understand a fish couldn’t smoke, as smoke is air. The other mystics of the sea. Not mysterious, but intimate and leveled at being yours. I sing a song of six pence and carrying back a bone. What you think right before you drown her.
I don’t want him to find me with a knife in my back.
The sky doesn’t move. The sky hovers, but changes, and is never the same sky twice. The sky isn’t the things in the sky, but something else entirely. The sky asks no questions and tells no lies. The sky is open and tells the truth. The sky keeps it’s third wish unspoken.
The sky is different from the sea.
Combat the faithful thus: a horrible slap to the bitch-swept face you look in the mirror and recognize as you. Say it one more time. Your whispering only there to be for me here. And sometimes it seems like we’re doing the same thing over and over, but we like it so much. The absence of patterns makes us less human, less like the sea.
You carry your contraband like love in your pocket. All the people I love are drunk. I don’t give a shit. I was hoping for more and better things to happen to me. That one day when I realized I already had potential. That one day. You felt it too, I’m sure, and could comment on it at your leisure. Let’s have a drink together.
But after a question of how did we get here? there is just a long list of boring answers and even more boring justifications. The thought that can only exist by coming into existence, the roll and row, the feet first. The nastier bits. It is better to keep the potential wet, like dreams. They can be stocked and stored elsewhere. But I’d like to keep a list of them with me, deep in my pocket.
I suffered the recurring dream where the big queen from the other boat came up to me and told me I was a concave and that meant I was noise and purdy and nothing but a sailor slap to fish on and well I tore into her like mad and beat the back of her eyes like sores pestering out as globs of juice and filthy fuck yous the kind you call me in times of great stress and she laughs and says oh boy you little stinker and I just showered that evening so I know I don’t smell but then shower again anyway and wash my asshole extra hard so as to keep sure they tell you that you should always be careful in places where the sun don’t shine but I felt scrawled in light so I scrubbed harder the harder I try to wake up from the dream and it keeps happening so the queen takes me over her skirt and lashes out a few phrases of “cannot prevent” and “stuck under the sand” and “I wish you were more red there” and I don’t know what to say I’m shaking so hard my knees kinda collapse and I’m resting on my knees the waves making the boat rock so much barrels are swaying and almost tipping over she wants me to sing her the French song about heads and I don’t know that one she keeps saying “you’ll have to give up your head” and that doesn’t fit I spell my name but it comes out J-E-A-N and I know that’s wrong but I spell it that way anyway it’s like a kind of horror on angles and there are so many others just watching just standing there watching so I go to untie my shoes but find that my shoes have no laces but I need to untie them to get them off somehow thinking I’ll be able to swim better without them but I can’t figure out how to get them off to get them off my goddamn feet so I kneel there sucking her cock she’s demanding something that spells disaster so even the fish can sense it and while sucking she says to me “atta boy, sailor, just like you and your other boyfriends do it” and I remember how when I was younger and how my grandmother would tell me stories about her and “her girlfriends” and that didn’t make sense to me because she wasn’t a dyke and only dykes had girlfriends and I don’t sleep with my guy friends right now so I don’t know who she was referring to but I kept sucking all the same thinking now in terms of nothing else matters and this whole dream just leaves me confused and conscious of that confusion and how her cock tastes like sweat and seawater almost the same thing and the flaw is interspersed that sailors can do anything it’s the fight we hold on to and relish the love we cannot hold close enough as to feel like it’s always kept far away at sea like sailors always do
But we aren’t sailors, never were sailors at all.
