There are tiburones off the Fla. Keys
Believe me, out there in the aqua deeps
Sometimes they swim up into the sandy shallows
But not often;
And usually only at night while you’re on a veranda sipping a
Glass of red wine,
Safe in the glimmer of a tropical neon beer sign
Underneath palm trees.

These tiburones swim off shelves and under cantilevers
Continental shifts in deeps
Sandy bottoms, they cruise by
Like missiles
Fired from dusky deep ephemera
Assimilated by the amorphous ocean infrastructure
Flotsam and careened ships off gray coasts
Rusted and dead steel under the raining ash
And the sea foam that pools around their husks they falter, canted, and tipped
And lost as quick as were, gone, betrayed to the deeps again.

But, sometimes, tropical shallows
A Latin lover's osculant kiss
A fumbling of the belt buckle
Swimming dark waters under moonlight
Dark eyes, red lips
Surl breath dlipped wet
Held in ocean's gentle soul
Pearls aligned distant metaverses
Transcendent, therefore, only Beautiful

They don’t care to bother with you, mostly, the tiburones.
They’re curious, a dorsal fin to cut the surface, an indifferent pass
You are not the wine they seek to drink.

But if you find yourself afloat;
Lost or hurt,
If you venture too far from your shore,
Carried by the gentle waves, the inverse gravity of water
When the ocean seems benign...
...They’ll come cruising.

It won’t take long.

Doll-eyed and mechanical, they’ll swim by
Just to say..... Hello.

I have not seen many tiburones but they impart,
Even to those who have never seen them,
This unspeakable fear:
Not so much of the Ocean—Few ever enter the Ocean
But of some assimilation of thought
Where it passes by from dark end to dark end
Sunrise to sunset, and a portentous silhouette beneath you,
If not of the wry toothed smile, and the porcelain ghost…

Then of what?
Could it be of the thought of teeth?
Or of a malicious ghost agnostic of your importance?
Of the specter that cares not of your potential,
Disregarding your position in this world.
Something that treats you with true Equality-

Could it be the things in this world that say Hello with teeth?
There are abbreviated bits of flesh rent in life.
I wear these battle worn scars.
And not instead of love but because it’s the only way
They know how to smile at you.
It’s how they say Hello.

I only have seen their reflective eyes in the shallows
Off the verandas where I have sat and drank
Drunk myself into a stupor, a vibration in my fingertips, in my mind
No sommelier am I.

The red liquid fills my mouth and paints my teeth an indelible red and drips from my mouth from my ****** lips
I have bit too hard,
And spilled my red wine onto the table
Watching it drip viscously off the table and stream to the floor
And pool in great deep redness on the veranda’s floor
Drops and drops and then, restless, I drop back into the depths
In the dead, burnt-out center of the wine’s pool
And watch it assimilate into the porcelain.

And the deep darkness of the red miscegenates with white porcelain
And it all fades in and out standing on that perfect precipice of wine and violence
The wind and flux of ocean waves and darkness
Those eyes down there, refracting moonlight, deadened orbs
The wine deliquesces from veranda’s precipice to waves
The great adulteration, the miscegenation, it all goes flux.

And I drop off, assimilated into darkness, there:
Where the bits of flesh torn from teeth and I swim away
Dismembered, deformed

And a flutter in the shallows,
A quick, precise splash,
A perfect torsion
Writhing bodies.

And those black eyes roll over white,
And those archaic teeth descend,
And pulled under the dark ocean
Without even the moon to give me my light
And in my breath’s last seconds,
I’m perfectly assimilated into this structure,
Deliquesced, relaxed, and gone into the depths,
Swimming in the sulfuric bottom
Of my glass of red wine.