[PancakeBrah]

Overboard.

I can taste the sea’s salt. Teetering, see-saw in the ocean’s breeze.
All you could hope to see. The vast expanse, underneath; the chorral reefs.
In my mind, a chorus sings. Of freedom, of horrid things;
to jump through these planks of wood and towards the stream.
I’ve played this scene out, this cogent dream,
so many times I felt nostalgia as soon as I broached the beams
with the sun at dusk, the reflected view. So serene.
Suspended
for one moment, enthralled in a wanderlust.
As every restrained synapse erupts, as I ardently summoned up...
...and released. Free. A God in the Summer dust.
Gorgeous; to ignore the math and instead start doing.
Karkosa. Off of the boat, to forge a path of my own choosing

The freedom to move. Salt water and cerulean hues.
Muscles to ache. Stomach and hunger a mate, futility’s ruse.
Freedom as far as I could see. For both crustacean and ape.
As the numb sensation abates to a feeling of nothing at all
while the formerly gorgeous sun sets to change Summer to Fall.
It’s by a toenail moonlight’s gleam that I soak,
as my eyes bleed and I choke with every weak freestyle stroke.
So staunchly alone with just this gauntlet I’ve thrown;
rather a free man dead than one kept alive watching a throne.
How long can a man live at sea? With no form of help to come?
Twice as well as one can than when under someone elses thumb.
Even as the time passes slow as the brine’s passive flow
and the mind’s grasp unfolds to show fine cracks exposed.
Still it’s better. As I gasp for air, with arms light as lead,
and the toenail creeps slowly towards the horizon’s edge.

-

Hour unknown. The sun hangs in the east, sky full of violet,
as death creeps as slowly as me towards a visible islet.
A thousand feet. An age and an era away, at the pace of swim.
You’ll never make it in. A body of dregs, with separated skin,
sodium scoured, head giving in to this elevating din.
Five hundred feet. Exhaustion. The weight of a journey
crushing all at once. Depression. The sensation of burning,
the first sensation in...who can even say? Pervasively yearning...
...one hundred feet. Palm trees, a garden gleaming.
Vision blurred, and hard of breathing. Cathartic wheezing.
The thoughts of leaving.

The tide moved me in, as my body had its fill
and my thoughts gave way to something so...still.
Ever close. Before I felt it all give way, I breathed, one more time,
the purest breath. As I died a free man, hand on the shoreline.

It felt like the warmest Summer night I ever knew.