In the basement sand is melting.

Imagine that, millions of years of crustaceous love stories, rocks slowly poisoned until they, along with ancient deep sea lovers, washed ashore to become the nuisance of the crevices of leather seats of automobiles.

In the basement the rocky lobster lovers are taking new shape as
the girl in the goggles
with the hair
tied back into a bun
forces air from her lungs into the
sticky
clearness.

That can’t be very good for you, breathing in a million
(maybe more)
years of betrayal and ****** and friendship and laughter
between ***** and clams.
It can’t be healthy to take
in so much at once.

I wonder what it’s like to speak a language known by so few.
To walk down an aisle in the supermarket and reaching the curves of a coca-cola bottle,
the girl in the glasses
with the bun
cries uncontrollably yelling,
“Do you see that?
All the beauty and the sadness
in the waves of molten sand in
six little bottles.”
To give your soul a little clear house, letting everyone look inside
(without really seeing)
letting everyone walk around it, and nodding and saying
“Oh will you see what she did there?”
and seeing nothing but a misshapen
coca-cola bottle.

In the basement backbones are being melted into a new mold.

They are somewhere hidden in the waves I cannot read, amidst the million years I cannot hear of crustaceous love stories.

Sit with yourself and wonder
at the musings of the heart
soft tom-tom patterns
fluctuating
in the wirey veins of vessels.
Contracted tightly
at the seminal moment
of things undone.
Breathe breathe breathe
You are here
unkempt knots
loosed down your shoulders
rising with the tide.
Lay within the beach
dig deep into the sands.
In this scene
lost parables
and crustaceous creeds sinking,
stay that way.
Speckled grains
formless and void,
to be shaped
lined and caked
do these hands dare?

             Anwar Francis

My sweet little mollusk,
You polish the sea-tangy sand dollars smooth with the soles of your feet
You fill up your sweet siren lungs with a sun-sated breeze and submerge your bare fingers
Until they can sweep the slippery silt of the seabed abyss. I can’t sleep.
Your anemone fingers trace watery ripples through the ebbs of my dreams, trailing streams
Of fluorescent-blue algae sunk deep.  Your barnacle tongue shatters ships
Into ruinous splinters of treasure. I kiss
The cerulean ocean that hides in your lips.

My sweet little scallop,
The galloping waves break the curves of your shallows.
There are flecks of unpressed sea salt brine in your irises, tireless riptides of foaming-bright promises.
Your skin has the silvery sparkle of scales that effervesce endlessly, bending beneath the fierce tides of your palmprints.
I’m dropping. The current caresses your cheeks’ fishbone hollows, rethreading the necklaces strung out of seashells.
You bury your face in the swells of the tempest. I envy
Your azure, I worship your lapis.

My sweet little mussel,
Your tussled cyan-coral hair is unbleached, unleeched and resplendent
I am rendered transcendent by the green iridescence of your silk seaweed whispers. I have drowned in your splendid.
I can still hear your aquamarine through the white roaring waves cracking onto the shore.
I want more. Your crustaceous sand whirlpool has nestled below the soft curl of your chest. You press the world’s oceans in the dip of your palms
And drink deep from the waves swirling under.
I’ve drowned in the water-spilled seas that are cupped in your hands,
I have drowned in the pearls of your wonder.

You used to read out our horoscopes
over lazy breakfasts with the Sunday rags.
We'd giggle at "romance in unexpected places",
mock "finances are on the rise",
the new moon always "brings profound changes",
and you'd say "hey, it's all just a load of rot".
While I'd sip my coffee in silent acquiescence,
I'd be secretly hoping that perhaps it was not.

When the stars aligned and brought about our conjunction
who could have foreseen what the fates had planned?
If only we'd known then what we know now,
we'd have seen the danger of uniting two sheep-headed rams.
Those signs of fire mistaken for warmth,
now signs of a love burnt out,
all that's left are dying embers
and my thoughts, full of doubts.

Fate, you had eleven other signs to choose from,
my bad luck you sent one like me.
Where-oh-where was soft, gentle Pisces?
Or dreamy-wet Aquarius?
Sweet, virtuous Virgo promising so much loving.
Or a well-balanced Libran stuck on her fence.
I have taken a Capricorn so, so capricious
or even a narcissistic Scorpio.
I mean, at the end of the day
how many times can you be stung?

No doubt you're now reading the stars over breakfast
with some more 'compatible' sign:
A two-faced, backstabbing Gemini,
a flat-headed Taurean bullock ***-machine,
a free-loving, hairy Sagittarian,
that oh-so-perfect-fence-balancing Libran,
or maybe some gorgeous, leonine Leo
has you wrapped up in his golden, free-flowing mane.

But I hope that when the Zodiac finally stops spinning,
your roulette wheel of life comes to rest on black,
and you land up with an ill-tempered decapod,
a hard-shelled, crustaceous, side-walking crab.

Bitter
Each all crustaceous here