Big ships, small ships, yachts and dingeys
Floating across the mighty sea
Carving their way, displacing their weight
To keep afloat the Captain and First mate.

Old ships, new ships, schooners and cruise liners
Have crossed paths throughout the ages old
Once to explore, make claim, pirate and fight
Now to wine and dine on a luxurious bite

Salted beef, rock hard bread and weevil-friendly biscuits
A 3 course meal fit for Old Salts alike
Weevils & worms and bugs of all kind
Along with sparse portions of meat, you might find

French wine, filet mignon, sushi and pastries
Buffets and fine dining, variety is key
All you can eat, whenever you'd like
No chores, no work, just eating all night'

What a contrast exists between these two worlds
Only 2 to 300 hundred years apart
Once grimy, risky, arduous and fraught
Now fancy, lazy, and much to be bought

What if the Old Salts could teleport to today
And live aboard our floating hotels?
With no masts to climb or sheets to tend
Would they break or would they bend?

I suppose that switch would be easy enough
But send us back to Pirate-ridden waters
You'd be sure never to hear from us again
Swabbing the deck would **** us alone
Not to mention the food and disease of back when.

- BPW 
Dec. 11, 2013

If I sung you to sleep,
what would you dream?
of mystery and madness?
of love and revenge?
of spiralling staircases, culminating
swiftly in a pool
of swirling fear?

Starfish –
sleep slowly,
sleep soundly.
Stretch bubbly limbs that
are kissed by the shore,
hugged by the sea.

This cove
of creeping creatures,
they slip and slime
like a plastic bag
of goldfish.

What will you dream?
of memories:
when you were swept
away from the sea
to dry on the sand
like a limpet?

Bubbling, giggling,
blobbing starfish:
sleeping, sliding,
slipping out of place,
slipping out
of starfish dreams.

Never cook with a fairy tale omnibus
open on a kitchen table,
or confuse salt with sugar.

Cherry-pit pies are like eating dragon bones, as to
be expected of one taught to
        never cook with a fairy tale omnibus,

safer to love a beast than to open up to
strangers, precise butchers cutting hearts
        open on a kitchen table;

I love you like salt, preach obedient daughters, omitting
the ease to mix dream with wake
        or confuse salt with sugar.

ah.
the smell of it
of salt and sand
there is no
elixir on this
good/tragic /blessed
earth like it

I’m not quite sure, yet everything I do
appears to me as being viciously half-assed
yet sincere.
I write this mid-winter [I guess?] on the RTA
with twenty dollars on me and I don’t want to know
in the bank, with cold feet, both literally and metaphorically.
The future looks decent from a distance in bar light.
As I feign some resemblance of being classy and
collect more sodium on my footwear,
I ponder the passing of an officer who flashed a light
to look at me in the dark on my way from home.
It makes me glad I speak English, where there
are such hard, sharp and unsympathetic undertones
to phrases like, “*******”.
It’s dark on the way through Cleveland.
Try to stay warm.