There’s the pull of the tide of Azazel, dragging me down to obsidian depths where lampreys from alien worlds suckle at the teat of Leviathan.  Your arms are the Cambrian ocean, and I am a fabled creature long extinct, many legged like a sea scorpion, scuttling to your lips to latch on with pedipalp that can breathe both in and out of water.  My progeny will leave your bosom and flee to the shore, shipwrecked on pearly sands, and weave webs to capture sparrows and dragonflies and voles.  Feasting on your salty skin, I know the great extinction is fast approaching, be it comet or climate change or ocean acidification, and your shores will dry up and your cliffs of ice at the poles will pummel me as glaciers crash against my chitinous exoskeleton.  This is just a metaphor for how we fight, me the small arachnopod navigating your waves, for you encompass worlds with your H20 and I am just a small resident in your underwater hotel room, and you are the whole of Atlantis.  They will say your treasures were buried ten leagues below when your pride became too great and you challenged the gods, but I know Jormungandr was thrown into the sea because he grew so great he could eat the nine realms, and you are ravenous – for my kisses, for my sex, for my breasts bobbing in your aquatic hands and my whole body in the mud of the Dead Sea, healing in your salt.  It is all a dream of sailors, to marry a mermaid, to pledge their troth to a nokken that fiddles desire and tricks on cold Norwegian seas where my ancestors roamed.  And so I say, Poseidon, grant me one wish.  To forever be your siren, singing humans to doom at your breast aback the undertow of your liquid love.  I will serve you well I promise, o my captain, for I am like a buoy, constantly riding out tempests with cheery red and yellow paint so my lobsterman – you – can find me and the Maine treasures below.  The ocean takes all, nutrient overflows and algal blooms and bodies rotting so only the feet float above, and it has claimed me since I was baptized in your cold New England waters.  In truth, we are the shape of water, which has no shape, but we can boil, and we can steam, and we can bubble, and we can freeze, so I say, let us be the transformation of each other and discover what this love means when the mast falls and the captain’s daughter falls for the admiral.  We can be pirates of the Milky Way, plundering nitrogen oceans for diamonds, sailing Jupiter’s storm, and all the while I will be singing sea shanties (all sea songs are composed in your honor, oh great Oceanus) and throwing prisoners off the plank.  The sea is not merciful, the sea is all-consuming, and so we feast on each other, drinking down starlit riptides.  I fill my belly with the waters of God’s Deep and then I know, I am just sand and coral and dissolved calcium carbonate, a statue sunken deep, and you cradle my wreckage so softly, so love, consume me with your gravity, and let me drown.

via Shipwreck – Allie Nelson