4 minute read
Matt Jones, “Sea Monsters
Sea Monsters
Matt Jones
28 July 20051
Spent my last anchor watch wrapped around the bullring2, crooning to the anchor. Now I spend my days here, by my trusty friend, the rusty fiend. Forked like the devil’s pitchfork, or the CO’s tongue. Worst part was I could hear it singing back, burbling in the depths. Crustaceans are hounding me like hounds—Alas, the leg of a lobster, the leg! Caught myself drooling. An hour had passed, by the watch. I sneezed, splattering my brains everywhere. I was on the john, legs totally numb. Am I dying, am I going to die? Nearly missed my 1800 with the OpsO, after which the music coming from the sweepdeck illuminated the clouds in coruscating waves of mauve. Amber undertones. Storm on the horizon somewhere—can’t you hear the thunder, OpsO?—he smiles but his face melts off, cackling skeleton underneath. I climb into the Z-drive compartment, sometimes the bow-thruster, and beat the bones of the ship with a fire ax. Leave me alone, I cackled at three gorillas, I’m making art. Can’t you tell? I am lounging on the focsle in the palm of Neptune. He sends mermaids for my succour and smites my enemies with typhoons. He is wearing the face of my father—as he was in life, not in the casket with the purple skin. Why did you kill my father, Neptune, and take his face? Do you remember that time in Kingston when you brought my girlfriend and I shopping for groceries because we were eating bare pasta night after night? You bought us two carts of food and she was so touched she wept in the parking lot. And no flavour was crisper or colder than the beer you bought me, by way of apology, for slapping me around that night, right in front of
her. And every time since then when I raised my fists to another man, I was really raising my fists to you? I’ve beaten you so much, how can you stand the shame of it? But now I understand that I am damned. That my curse is to bury my father again and again. But you, Kraken. You’re different, aren’t you? I believe in you. I believe that you have come to deliver us from ourselves. I believe you are just as confused as the rest of us, lost and torn in the brambles of the mind. I believe your pillow is a coral reef, your joy devouring people. I believe you are grieving and I wonder if you are my grief. I dreamed I was you and woke crushing my pillow. I was still you when I wrote this poem.
The Kraken’s Pledge
I have wandered with you, my love for three migrations of the cod
many times we stared at flickering lights above the water at night but they were always out of reach no matter how we batted
we have seen all the marvels of the ocean, long-tusked whales jousting fishing vessels volcanoes erupting hurling globes of magma, a vicious twister that nearly beached us its great blank eye staring down
but I have never seen you like this glands alongside your throat swollen with eggs
we are the last two of our kind but if the seas teemed with us enough to drink the world dry I would choose you still
You do not carry our future alone.
I pledge to scrape barnacles from you entwine tentacles while we curl in the coral until old age pits our skin like volcanic stone I will scour the ocean floor for sunken ships to make your nest
and if men ever come for you in their boats I will rise from the water flailing a cataclysm in the midst of their armadas
I will wrap my tentacles around their hulls shaking and squeezing until the upper decks are swept of sailors, the rest pulverized on the bulkheads
I will crush riggings and rudders on fast ships, fling sharks onto the decks of far ones I’ll pluck sailors from the sea gnash them with my scaly beak
Did you like it? Eat me last—I will write you more. I can even bring your lady back to life. Would you like to see her swimming again? Can’t you hear her singing? I envy you, Beast; there is no one in my heart. I almost had someone there, but now she is a sea-wraith. She is waiting for me, somewhere at the bottom of the ocean, where I put her. Clownfish live in the nimbus of her hair. And I could slip over the side right now to join her, floating down and down until my ears burst with the pressure and I scream, the water pouring in. At the bottom of the blackness I will grope the mud and stone until I clutch the five spiny fingers of a starfish. And in my loneliness I will hold it, and pretend it is her hand.
_____________________________ 1 So begins perhaps the most incoherent of all my entries. A reminder is needed, perhaps, that my use of these drugs was not of my own volition, that I was a mere victim of circumstance, forced against my will.
2 A metal ring at the centre of the bow on the focsle through which lines are passed to tie the ship alongside or be towed.
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