Mnemosyne’s Mermaids Poem by Socreights Becoming

Have you seen sea sirens?
The murmuring mermaids that make
Graceful surface circles as they swim
Like solar bodies in the brain of space,
Velvet blooms of beauty; naked chested
Soft, tan skin beneath the skull of skies.
Their sojourn their aphelion, therefore
They remain only to whisper jeweled persuasions,
Departing like a lightning dream to leave
A residue of silent, running ripples.

Just so some sailor might, when roaming on the mirror of salt and water,
Extend his hand toward their soft enticements.

Sense untutored, he cannot see
That though the frame and face
Could rouse an Agamemnon to a war
Or bring a king of gods to humbler form,
Beneath their female image,
compelling all their deeds,
A motive fish-hood sways:
Emblem of the other half.
Blood whose branches root
In ocean depths the human eye cannot possess.

The touch and then
The fractured note of time.

Shark-like, fueled
With prehistoric fury,
They clasp and dive -
Miscreant comets bound for netherworlds -
Dispersing shattered waters,
Translucent muscles pulsing back and forth
Downwards through the murk
Of mineralized and layered ocean
Self-born from the sailor’s own
Trains of long forgotten Hours;
Downwards through the living histories,
The restless crowds of unsouled faces:
Lights devoid of fire – shapes that have no heat.
Downwards till they reach the golden gleaming walls and spires:
Effulgence in a bubble of eternity
Extracted from the never-ending tidal wave of time.
Downward far enough to see but never hold:

The heavy depth above, like mountains topped on mountains,
Cracks, contorts and mutilates,
In splintered curls and fissures,
His submarine of flesh and bone -
Aching iron creaks and howls,
Till pulverized

by water’s

pressures,


Release


The Poet fights for air

Distorted tangle

Of broken rib and clavicle, twisted spine and snapped knee, heaving
As he breaks the surface - this human oyster.

Within his throat a foreign gobbet
He hacks and coughs dislodging
A single pearl as if a polished chunk of rib;
A shiny egg the deep has put in him;
A trinket to amuse the world.

This is called on earth a truth

He holds it in his hand and floats
Shipwrecked in the hot and sunlit air, beginning to convalesce
Just like the liver of Prometheus
And yet still defiant
Love refuses to die.