This depression
runs deeper than Hadal.
A dead man’s float
protects me from drowning,
and I’m told how strong this is,
as if it’s the same as
parting this Red Sea with my own hands.

In moments of sufficient serotonin,
I believe them, some days
arms go brittle, body limp,
stillness capturing blood shot eyes,
and right before I drown
something saves me,
but when I come to,
I cough sea water against the shore,
and I am still alone.

The ocean’s soot stained hands are the only constant I can recognize.

I know it will come back.
It always does.

He would ride up to the field
God had lain so purposefully for him
Along the final bight of an earthen track.
Narrow, which climbed, as with him
It swerved. He believed in God then.

Fenced off, blades became thick as
A dare, a moment—before confession
Or asking out his girl, the one whose
Crescent eyes in smile moonlit clefts
In his time. He would see her moving

Her body like His girl, exhaling His
Name, as if He was her only breath.
Through oceanic grasses she would
Flow in his ear, all the warm hadal
Mist of her. Aging wood throbbing

From gusts of wind on the fence. Deep
Enclosure of slender stalks and stems
Swaying by the rhythm of an ancient
Reverie. Crickets and junebugs, early
Fireflies lilting, sung to him tunes of

Indecipherable freedom. But not once
Did he cross, not once did he ever
Disturb a nature obeying the music.
Only the torrid yearning he allowed
To slip through the separation, knowing

There it was reunited, home among
The barely heard hum of the grasses
Oneiric and bare. Years later, when
The fence had disappeared, he once
Walked through and was overcome

By an emptiness thrashing against
Emptiness. In a single gust, scented of
His desinence, those years passed again
And he thought. Even if I’d crossed,
Had joined—not disturbed. Even if.

There’s you,
coming up to breathe
for but a few heartbeats
before returning to the
deep, where there’s none
other than those who
belong.

Oh, what a marvelous space,
inverted space to be exact,
to live and float while
still retaining our right to
drift, kick and scream
to noone else but us.

At several leagues I
heard a sound that gave
my neck a chill, but not
the kind that makes one small,
instead the kind that feeds
gigantism in the icy north’s
hadal spheres.

From there, the rest seem lightyears off,
and closely similar in kind and way,
but as you rise at speeds that would
give a man the bends, those waves
will wash away the frightened guppy
until only the brave and strong remain.

It’s a long way down for sure, to
those who couldn’t sense or feel
that rush of bubbling need for fresh
and clean sky in the lungs,
so now theirs hold about a
half dozen wet litres each,
the poor fools.

But what a sight it was to see,
to watch the whitecap gleam
above a newly capsized crew,
and presently neath the sun and
moon and stars at same time;
to hear the truest form of life
that came from both high and low;
now that was worth a second look,
or a third.

And there was I,
wading with my
smallest green lure
and bishaded buoy,
and nothing else was.

We sit triangularly, some satanic ritual waiting to unfold.
In the menacing strobe light music, between dull musings
Of a week, a month, a lifetime ,I enclose the cold pitcher
Sizing it against my face, I look into it to find life.
And like muddied ocean deep I feel distant dorsal fins
Guttural cries in coffee flavoured beer, of creatures slipped
In the abyssal zone and dying for lack of oxygen-
On the dark dark ocean floor, this table for three or four.
The triangle now stretches like a catapult, his long limbs
leaning, so taut in temptation of far away loneliness
I reach out my amphibian arms, my gelatinous tongue
and he dissolves like a fly upended mid flight, shaking
his head over the foam from the mug, I'm okay, It's alright.
The waiters wait on invisible trays like weighed down wraiths
and ask us if we're old enough to swim; we hold hands
like a cult of dolphins, this table is our ballast, these green
napkins our sail and our age far undermines our agency,
If we choose to drown, it would be at our own mercy.
He's flung back by something we say and I am far removed
Into the reflection of Christmas lights in July, evaporating
into pleasantries and digressing golden tears into the pool.
Someone breaks this exorcism of rationale, scraping  a chair-
restroom, I need to use the restroom, oh this uneasiness of habitat.
If we were truly fish, our insides as salty as our outsides, gracefully
I would be gliding in the water and fumbling not for the phone lock.
We take turns breaking the geometry of friendship and acquaintance,
of corporate hellfire, footballers and friendlies and the difference
between sweatshirts and hoodies, these ****** diuretics.
Cheek down on the table, I steal a pebble from a fancy bush to
introduce my brain to my hands and my hands to cold relief,
Buzzed like a doorbell I am regurgitating smaller fish into porcelain.
I eat with cutlery intended to serve and talk myself into hadal trenches,
Here in the underworld I look to my thoughts like Orpheus;
they die before taking shape, once more I am questioned for my faith.
I sit in the back of the cab, little plastic bisleri in hand, ocean ****
lining my mouth and I understand the traffic lights like a child;
We sit quietly chattering with our sobriety and hold each other
like children, we must look like dead fish with those boney shoulders.