11th February 2023

Do Not Come to Death to Cry

Hear indeed, and understand nothing. See indeed, and perceive nothing.

We’re riding in a boat, its motor rattling and gasping for breath in 

between swallowing every wave, and its bow is trying its best to stand straight in a slouch

that smells of salt and rust, and the slowing speed is the source of everyone’s amusement 

and each window cries all their worries in great drops of grease. We could keep on

going, the way we have to consider the boat’s defiance in the face of our commands, 

the way it chooses to slip for a second no matter how firmly the wheel is turned, 

how the bubbles trailing the rudder make a cloudy morning, the creaks in the hull causing 

problems with the maintenance crew. Sure enough,

it’ll end up dismembered in some dismantling yard, as scrap in a garage, as ashes in 

a power plant if we’re being thoughtful. Maybe it’ll be refurbished, repaired, waxed 

by someone who the boat will never recognise because it would never be us. But maybe, 

just maybe, it’ll dissolve into the waves like an island swallowed by the sea, up to

the spot where we’re sitting right here, talking away

gripping the rail to the point our knuckles show bone,

our seats made of the wind and the terror 

that sings to us when we look towards the Earth. It’s warnings of

trouble and darkness, and dimness of anguish; it’s driven

by the currents and not the boat, the water

goes softly in the archipelago, and it will reach the riverbeds cracked dry by drought, 

even the farthest of fields; the stretching of its wings will fill every inch of the land. 

People will ready themselves and be broken into pieces. Through 

the windows of the boat we look again, 

the water’s blue is now actually burning. We’re getting to see it so clearly, so closely, because 

sometime between past and present, it has swallowed us without anyone realising. It’s

the fuel of the strongest fire, and it sprays fierce sparks 

and shouts a dozen uplifting cries 

around us, 

through us, 

in us. 

Because once

we’re lit up in anguish, then the greatest of passions starts to breathe its first breath. 

When there’s nothing left, then there’s nothing to turn back to. In the moment 

we do something worth dying for, that’s when we begin to 

live.