God save me from left and right.

A hundred decisions and revisions--
I never want to cry,

I want to swell up on the treacherous surf that betrays me.

May each drop of saline-sympathy
Melt back into eyeball-oblivion,
Creep slickly down my throat,
And escape hereafter through my ten toes.

But too many of them I have banished this way.

Once they merely wet the soles of my feet,
Callous from a million paths undiscovered.

Now,
They whisper terrible things in my ears,
Terrible things:
They whisper

Until my lungs grow so full of their sound they

pop
and leave me
an empty woman
chin-deep
in the satisfied grey ocean I once refused to admire.