Darele Bisquerra
a creative soul
his love was across the sea
His love was across the sea's horizon, beyond the reef of dead coral bone. A swimmer he was not, but the sea belched between them, a heaving presence that ignored all but itself. He was not tempted by its rolls, but compelled by her distance.
Submerged in cold waves that squoze his heart and clamped his lungs, he crawled hard against its force. They wrestled unevenly, the sea and he.
Passing verdant islands, thick with forest & slithering secret life, he pulled on. Egrets teased him with low heady swoops; his muscles were tough as fish, but ached, tearing with each cold stroke.
The sea groaned at the clanging of a deep metal rig. Swirling currents ruled here, but he choked through mouthfuls of bitters to dodge dark the curling wave breaks.
A raft of timber knocked him off stroke. As he reached to steady himself, scores of shipwrecked books cascaded over him – warped covers & pulpy pages of type dissolved into the salt depths.
amorphic creatures of dull silver
Amorphic creatures of dull silver follied beneath his kicks. He appeared as a giant sea spider oddly haloed from their low view. They weren't hungry today, as he hauled himself along the deep meridian.
Her blurred figure blended into the beachsand, a flurry of white gauze & blown quartz. He pulled hard on the final strokes, slicing the cold aqua til his bleached feet gripped the pebbles & his ankles tangled past seaweed.
She was calm, staring.
Forcing himself into the gravity of the shore, his flesh was sore, membranes tattered, the rosiness of his torso a weak hint of veined life.
He looked long & slowly at her dark eyes and remembered the waves' slaps & his persistent clawings; the moist islands at which he did not stop to rest; the birds pecking, taunting, and the mouthfuls of bitter oil he gasped and swallowed.
Images of wet torn pages occluded his vision as he gulped their letters. Evading the slices of jagged sea relics, while outstroking the unnamed amphibians, had burned the retina of his consciousness.
He looked long and slowly at her patient face, but did not recognize her.
His waterlogged lids tried to blink her into meaning, but instead pressed heavily shut.
Numb from his damp journey, he felt a blankness permeate his being. A flush of heat to the cheeks, then a rush of ice filled his arteries.
Calf to thigh weakened until all tissue was limp and tender.
Succumbing to the gravity of emptiness, he collapsed onto the warm sand, lifeless at her feet.
She looked to the sun.
The sun looked away.