The Jack-Tar's Lament

Anyone who saw me wash up on Talk Beach that so-called endless summer years ago would have seen a man concentrating so deeply he'd fallen off the edge of the world. I was a moon gazer, horizon watcher, Palinurus at the ghostly helm, Ishmael in the crow's nest. What you saw was a man of few words frozen between frequencies, distracted by windy isotopes in his veins. When I tried to speak, sing really, I tried to sing something luminous you'd never forget. For example, the invisible opened its celestial coffin to me or the azure waves, the salty ambergris meant nothing. What you heard was a man exhausted by swimming, who gave his paltry warblings to the pilings of the sea. By day the names of stars, unseen, revolved inside me, by night the stars themselves whose names I could never remember. And you who bent down to touch me, out of a duty perhaps to what you still considered sacred, or at least suitable – yes, I was alive, but what I call living on Talk Beach that so-called endless summer years ago when the world's blemish reappeared, and the indefatigable longing of men, who knows, it seemed scarcely different from drowning.