three short poems in regards to the ocean

I.

The sea rises to my parted lips, longing to be pressed to your eyelids

but instead are met by a current of regret and eternity.

I drown with your name washed from my tongue by foam and wave;

love me now whilst forever’s seaspray mists my hair and cheeks.

Quickly, before I am pulled beneath the surface.

II.

One-thousand butterfly kisses cast to

a never-ending sea of lost dreams;

to gaze upon eternity

with tired eyes,

blurred from tears and exhaustion.

Bittersweet memories caught in

a blinding glare off gentle waves,

soft with the hopes of the sleeping dead.

III.

The drenched syllables of your name,

like a prayer they linger on my lips,

for eternity, for all crystalline moments,

frozen in your pupils,

endless as the ocean.

A sea of the tears of saints flowing from your irises.

Look into my eyes as you kiss me,

let me see the pain of fading memories and

threadbare sacred words.

Drown me in martyr’s tears

for you are my religion.

the moon, too

The Moon, too, misses her lover;

what pain she must feel with each drawing of breath

to be so many thousands of miles away from his warmth.

She, too, is so close yet so very distant

and the Sun, he can almost hear her singing.

Perhaps one day they will find one another,

perhaps one day their luminous bodies will

become joined again.

The Moon, too, she hopes one day she

will no longer be lonely.

marie antoinette steps to the guillotine

The thoughts stir behind semi-precious eye-lids, fluttering like finches in morning’s first light;

She knows once her neck is severed the peasants will bathe their hands

in her blood as though it were rubies and garnets.

She wonders if the blade, which is put to good use,

will be kind to her in her feeble state

or if the sharp edge will caress her ravaged neck multiple times.

Her soft pearl hands gather tattered skirts as she steps to the executioner’s perch.

Like a great vulture, his topaz eyes watch her as she places each bare foot carefully,

seeming to spend a century to take the next step.

Four hundred years pass for her, stair by stair.

With honour, she walks across the bloodstained wooden boards.

She kneels, supple marzipan knees upon splintered wood;

She kneels where every brioche peasant wants her,

where every failed émergée knelt to receive his fate in the form of the guillotine,

bloodthirsty and ominous, the godless machine of Robespierre.

It bears its silvery teeth as she places her neck upon the block.