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.