Underwater Jazz Band Poem by Arthur H Rowley

Have you ever noticed how sometimes
If you're really still and patient and good at holding your breath
You can lay flat beneath the water in your bathtub until it appears like the surface is perfectly still?

And you try to creak open your eyelids beneath the blue of cheap bubble bath
Until you're staring into a starry night interpretation of your bathroom light
All twists and pulls and smudges of a captured blaze
The dripping of the faucet that you never thought to fix becomes a staccato rhythm
Weighing down upon your pulse and convincing you that you could stay down here
Where you lungs feel stuck together like taffy
And there's a $300m painting pulling itself apart across the cracks in your ceiling
Sinking into the sky
Taking tiny pieces of you and this planet with it

After all
This world that hold us is 71% water
And 96.5% of which is in our oceans
Which make up around 60% of me
So, it only makes sense that 57.9% percent of myself would want to stay here
Beneath the bubble-gum surface
Blown like glass across my bathtub
Until my body is burning with desire for the syrupy sweet oxygen i pluck from the air
As though this is a jazz bar and I am a trumpet
Taking a desperate moment to pull sounds into my throat and hold them there
Waiting

Or maybe I am the piano, as I always thought I might be
The cracking of sticking keys being pulled up by frantic fingers
Or the sustain that no longer works and instead allows each note to be pulled
Thin like paper from the chest of the beast
No practised caution or patience necessary
These notes know where they are supposed to be

Or maybe I am a man at the bar
New to town, or at least he was, but no one ever told him how long the induction period lasted
He is sorrow and grief being forced to his extremities to make room for all this sound
He or I hold a glass that is only around 40% ocean
Although we do continue to add to it with our own 98% solution
Made strong with years of mistakes and moving and losing loved ones
And oh god that music being tipped into his or my ears
And filling us up like a wonder eyed welcoming honeycomb

Now beneath the surface I can imagine my lungs are filled with a full jazz band
The clicking of glasses against each other within the waiter's hand
Of taffy and syrup and honey
And of sorrow and grief
And bubble-gum blown like glass
And of a night sky pulled apart by pain and i need to find beauty in the darkest recess' of our worrisome little lives
All this pain and wonder and sweet
Making an alchemist inside this choking body after all

What I'm trying to warn you is
That the first breath is always the hardest
You will feel as though your body is attempting to crumble around you
After all you have done to protect it
But then you take another
And another
And you keep pushing and pulling the 4% solution in and against your body

Have you ever noticed how even if you're so still and patient and good at holding your breath
You can lay flat beneath stilling water
We all still surface?
Honestly you haven't a whole lot of other options
Look up at the tear-soaked oil painting in your memory pulling tea leaf patterns from your ceiling
Thank it for making the bitterness hide in the beauty from an untrained eye
And only when you realised how easily you found the pain
And watch it leak out into the atmosphere
With handfuls of you
Only then will you be still enough
And patient enough
And good enough at holding your breath
To return