Shipwreck

I boarded as a martyr, not to play with scarlet sins convinced my way was chartered, I'd be safe in holy folds but patient, pregnant umbras came, their membranes black and blue, all bred at sea in countless numbers just to consecrate eternity. Ripe thunderheads churned buttered skies and eerie purple dragons bled. The wise, east wind romanced my mind with easy whispers; ghostly thin. The whitecap rhythms preordained that all was fair on baffled seas, no wraiths of dry hope could be spared amidst the love and war aboard a lonely a ship claimed by the sea. The captain cares not if I'm dove or gull; a virgin or a saint, or if I've ever survived storms before, for waves return a ship to shore, one warped piece at a time. Forever seemed too short to have denied the truth of saying how "I never" flirted with the bulwark's edge and cast my fortune out before a pirate's eyes. A life's too short to remain sober, an uptight soldier minding angels camped out upon my shoulders pitching chaste, apocalyptic angles. I drank forgotten ecstasy and spilled confessions sweetly rotten, stripped my sail and set it free to be lapped up by sea-serf tongues above the swells of happy-never-after that is haunted by the humor of a million dead men laughing. "Of all sad words of tongue or pen The saddest are: It might have been." John Greenleaf Whittier's poem "Maud Muller" concludes: "If of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are, 'it might have been"