The Starfish

Sometimes I think the best poems I write are my musings on sex, or poems containing thoughtful inclusion of sex as it relates to everything -- which it does, of course, they way everything relates to everything, and maybe even more so -- but since these writings have so much potential to offend (like everyone's musings on sex, ever), I rarely post them anywhere publicly.
The Starfish is one of these good, but possibly problem-causing musings. I wrote it probably a year-ish ago.

The Starfish

I want to put sex at the center, like a bright red pin

in the middle of a map, somewhere in Africa, right

at the crosshairs of the Equator and the Prime Meridian,

but not like a destination, like an earthquake

with everything else rippling out from there

except the news crew vans screaming toward that singular

point of upheaval.

I want to put sex at the center, like summer

at the white hot apex of a year, how the all seasons

rise to its solstice and burst and fall away. I want all my days

to blossom from its beating heart.

Sex should be the nucleus and axis and pinnacle, the square

cornered foundation, the molten planet’s core, the origin,

Big Bang and flare in the darkness.

And since, when you cut the arms off a starfish,

they keep growing back and keep growing more starfish,

maybe there was only ever one starfish, one

stomach, one eye, one mass of arms with a mouth in its nest,

one first fistful of suction cups that multiplied and multiplied,

spreading, that taught everything else and all of life and us

to cling like hell to each other and the face

of the spinning earth.

Pangea

I have a folder called Writing. Within Writing, I have three other folders: Research, Shit Drafts, and Unrealized Material.
Shit Drafts and Unrealized Material are equally full. Apparently I do as much trashing of work that I've done as I do beginning things I never finish. But while Shit Drafts makes for nothing more than an embarrassing read, Unrealized Material occasionally yields good tidbits -- strong paragraphs, fascinating opening lines, intriguing images. And it almost always makes me wonder, "Where was I going with this?"
Below are some excerpts from a file in Unrealized Material called Pangea. Pangea, as best as I can remember, was intended to be a story about a boy who was kidnapped by pearl divers in the South Pacific. I never decided who he was exactly, or what happened to him. In some of my notes, he grows up with the natives, trains to be a pearl diver himself, and is married off to a native girl he eventually learns to love. In other notes, he's a stuck-up English boy who escapes, but finds himself still constantly drawn to the sea. What is obvious from the writing, though, is how much I loved this boy.
In any case, I doubt I'll ever finish it.

Pangea

They grabbed him right out of the water. 
Julian was only eight, after all, and amphibious by nature.  He spent hours in the sea, swimming the way that most boys run.  He was seal-like, with oiled and waterproof skin, barnacled here and there by brown freckles.  The irises of his eyes were brine green while the whites seemed milkier than usual – perhaps a product of evolution that allowed him to see under water.  If he’d only had webbed feet, he might have been the missing link.

Furthermore, if his parents had noticed any of these things, they would have been able to better describe young Julian Green to the authorities.  But they didn’t.  He was never officially found.  And thus the kidnapping Suluk pearl divers got to keep their prize.

“The world used to be whole.  Complete. Unbroken.  Think about it.”  Professor Manstead pushed a button and a new slide clicked onto the projector.

Julian lazily let his slitted eyes rest on the image.  It was an image of what they called Pangea – a single landmass that had supposedly once existed before the continents broke apart. 

“Perhaps,” Manstead intoned.  “It was some colossal earthquake.  A rift that shattered the earth’s crust in great upheaval, tectonic plates cracking without warning.  Such a seismism…”

Julian tuned out, letting himself feel pinched and awkward, as he often did in a classroom.

“Or.”  Manstead let his voice fall onto the word with emphasis.  “Maybe there was no earthquake.  No catastrophe.  No quick, devastating blow.  Maybe…the very continents just…drifted apart.”

Julian began to gather his books.

“And unless science will someday tell us otherwise, we will never know.”

We gave gravity the slip, left earth, and fell upwards into a deep Pacific sky. 

So this was pearl diving.  I became immediately disoriented.

Julian stretched out, his long fingers closing around mine, and gradually I perceived that we were moving in one specific direction.  His body descended ahead of me, tinted the color of lapis lazuli, bare and strong and ideal.  I was seeing him the way he was meant to be seen: through the lens of the ocean.  He kicked and paddled and I swam as hard as I could to keep up with him.  The bottoms of his feet were brown.

My eyes stung.  Saltwater.  The sea opened around me, a magnificent and intricate coral reef to my left, muted shadows to my right.  I let myself sink, imagined weights in my stomach.  Julian pulled away and grew dim.  The pressure gathered around us. 

New Words

I estimate that I wrote this poem about a year ago and I'm 90% sure that I plagiarized it -- if not the poem itself, then certainly the idea. But I don't know what from. And just because I likely stole it, that doesn't make it less true.

New Words

I want to hang my life on yours, to

twist us together

like wire.

I want to spread our days in a carpet all ahead.

I want to invent new words with you.

And, like all inventions,

they will go on, people we’ve never met

will say them.

People we’ve never met, in the dark,

will kindle our words for light.