Oceana

I ride the train home and think of him.

There is something about him
it has me stuck,
something compelling that has him running
right around the curliques of my brain.
His forearms, perhaps;
gently freckled.
They make me think of smooth wet sand,
sea-licked and solid,
clean, uninterrupted.
I want to leave footprints there
with the lightest impressions of my fingertips.

There are angles that make him almost beautiful
(like the careless abandon of a dreamer).
His eyes are blue.
He has a heavy brow, a ready smile.
I remember his face in pieces;
I cannot look at pictures of him.

My body is an anchor,
my mind a sail.
I am carried, protesting, forwards but my thoughts drift behind.

Sitting in a flowerbed,
I laid my head in his lap like a ship's cat
- an impudent four-legged sailor
who jumps up in the galley
without being asked.
I listened, eyes shut, to disembodied voices
discussing things of importance;
his fingers casually wandered my back like a map.
A silent wish for fingernails to softly drag along my scalp like a fishing net trawling through dark water.
Though they didn't,
the idea alone beat blood into my cheeks.

The delicate way we touched
it was nostalgia made mortal.
The delicious, homesick sound of a boy whistling your favourite song.

I ride the train home and think about
what it might be like to have him undress me,
what it would mean to have the rights to all of him,
to close the door and turn the key.
I puzzle about the way I felt near him,
the wild wide-eyed inexplicability
also a calm, quiet truth.
I wonder if it is
a little like love...
or simply being set adrift in the ocean
with only constellations for company.

I almost miss my stop.

Just a little something I'm working on...

Sometimes I stay awake at night and imagine what it would mean to be a seafarer, a siren, a selkie...I would talk in fathoms and sing sea shanties and forget the feeling of grass underfoot. I would dance with the mermaids, pay homage to Poseidon and stargaze underwater at the dancing lights held in the heavens above.