Ship
Is there a Captain? Or is this thing steered comradely by the mates—
Amid an unfaltering toxic rain, framing the whirlpools leading possibly to hell’s gates,
through hardening times
and inebriating tides.
And I’ve been waiting—
(inanely for a telepathically communed parley in the midst of all the broadcasted propagandizing,)
manacled on this deck for too long,
reading the writing’s on the mast which appears abrasively headstrong.
The crew shanties, “Never to show weakness. Never to shed a tear.
For they have been heralded as sins, we fear.”
They believe it is ominous when a lady’s on board, but it’s quite alright to leer.
Those are the teachings nailed into this hull.
Cut! Cut! There’s no need to be so theatrical.
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Indeed. Look who’s talking.
I know, I have no legs to stand on, my mistake.
(After all, I drowned the pegs in the cinders under the bridges in my wake.)
I’ve shined with a Kingian Zeus,
been beguiled by an Orwellian Odin.
Perhaps all I wanted was to be like an Austenian Shiva.
However, the generationally masculinized stones forbade me to flow like a river.
I would step on the stones, but again… with what legs?
Crew knows of my algae-clad anchor, my capsized compass, and pitchers & pegs.
(No surprises that I’m conveniently accused,
by a thousand communal guises my beliefs will forever be abused.)
They implore me to be (a red herring of) a man, and I shall be free.
But how? When it has always felt morally unerring to be a human on the count of three.
If I can’t walk (the talk or) the plank,
I shall creep down it.
No, I don’t belong here — shoot me point-blank,
I wouldn’t be caught dead around it.
All power to y’all, may the vessel rise and consume oppositions of all forms.
But let this terracotta statuette of mine be wishfully untrapped by the dragnets of societal norms.
“Row-on-it, matey,” my one-eyed soul says, “row-on—
you will reach the shore you were meant to be marooned on.”
