Poum.
Capricorn's Queen
I am alight on the ocean's inhale
Her bellowed lungs, her cresting blast,
Her salty fingers have me stormswept
On the twenty third line and drowning fast.
The sea is an angry Queen o'er abyssal plains.
She keeps her court in the deep-sea caves
with the rotting bones and the seaweed waves--
She's calling me, calling me home.
I have seen the prow of your Captain's ship,
I have paced the length of those rotting boards.
My Lady crushed its ribs with her riptide whip
And we were children lost at sea, Her drowning hordes.
I met a man on the topmost mast,
a crow's-nest find, and his eyes were foam.
He wrapped the ropes round his wrists and said,
"When the Lady calls, you go alone."
A cabin boy in the decks below
With his yellowed eyes and briny breath,
spoke: "When you're beckoned to the depths, you go,
For the Lady's only prince is Death."
The vessel yawed and swayed abeam,
It's keel splintered aft to fore.
The High Queen swathed it in her kelpy skein,
Laid it abed upon her ocean floor.
And I can feel my Lady breathing,
her tide, my pulse, swells in my breast.
And I am neck-high in her water,
Drowning as my Queen loves best.
I met my Queen at open sea,
I swam her spits with ocean eyes, alone.
My Lady came, swept wide her arms.
My Lady called, and I went home.