Tag Archives: tramp steamer

colony

09 Sunday Sep 2018

Posted by in Poetry, self-portrait, sonnet

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Your path is in the sea, your path is in the great waters and your footsteps are not known. — from, Psalm 77

Rusty iron ore tramp steamer painted pink
with a great garden of vegetables up

on deck. A tribe of wayfarers, with ink
and love, to sail the steamer, to worship

the waves and all of us in it. Gorgeous
sea-rose, wide mid-ocean. A colony

of cats, of cast-off children, of purpose
other than all this land-locked misery.

Fresh food, fresh water, fresh love; the rhythm
of the voyage slumbers in us. Sea trance

and dream. I want part of this tribal blood
of friends and lovers — in a rust-bottom

pink ship. I want a myth and a romance.
I want a voyage both wild and sacred.

yes, sin

24 Tuesday Sep 2013

Posted by in Poetry, sonnet

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Slowly, summer waking, you rise, lovesick
beastie, cacophonous, the way all fucks
before dawn make noise. We’re not awake, slick
in dream, wet under the sheets. Your stomach’s
end, the last stopping point of pubic bone
before the drop off and the hard column
rising before me. Wheeling in a blown
sky we are only voices. Come, we cum,
sea fire berries so ripe we cast shadows
on the waves like a Berber tale. Slowly,
with North Africa’s heat, rise. Are you sin?
Yes, sin. You pull away, crying like crows
denied their due. I’ll sail to Barbary,
aboard a tramp steamer, The Jianzhen.