cling
a poem
i cling to him like an empty bottle i've desperately wished into, washing away and shoring up on sharp sand, lighthouse flinging and flinging into the dark, i fling and fling from the cliff, crash and crash to the waves, trying to turn the tides time and time again, asking the moon, cursing at you, why won't you help me? why won't you save me? i'm chafed and i'm blistered, waterlogged yet dog-paddling on, eyeing any island that'll let me land, just touch my toe to sand, before the waves grab me again i cling to him like i have sea legs, like i'm some sea creature searching for seashells shining in shallows but he's no perfect pearl, no, not like the one who haunts my empty beaches, ghostly opal in sand-swept mirages, always i'm squinting for the oasis, always in salt water stasis i cling to him, knowing he is no life raft. knowing i can never touch him honestly. knowing i have had oars of my own, all this time. and it is only once that thought crystallizes into quartz that i can pull myself into the hull and haul i cling to my oars steadily steering myself eastward