Broken Anchor Chains [poem]
When wild untameable feelingthought impulses
wash their pheromonal tide against your temple walls,
you know your anchor’s chain has broken welcomely
and any ‘where’ becomes your tattered destination.
Old itineraries (now defunct) contain no information
while you flounder in the drowning dreely foam.
[Dolphins cackle smilefully around my reeling form,
cavorting in the way they do when no one’s there
to see them — when no audience has paid to watch
their tricks — and in my ecstasy I ride their backs
by invitation. When they disappear I soldier on
without them like a children’s cartwheel on the sand].
An irony which plays itself out on the level field is this:
No sanctuary comes to those who seek to find the shore.
The more we swim and try to hide from wild and weirdly
unpredictable unseasonal and darkly oceanic tides,
the less we’ll live and learn and know and grow and flow
and every step we take will be an underglow.
[Shearwaters circle overhead to watch my corpse float
tirelessly (though it’s not dead). I come to life instead
when I am out at sea, alone (though craving company with
those whose broken anchor chains {despite their pains}
have buoyed them up to surface on the surging tidal swells
wherevertheywillgo) — my raft a once-was one-man show].
© Alan Morrison, 2016
The Naked Troubadour 