Ocean Taxi

Waters boiling in sequence
around the elliptical bow and stern
with robes worn in tatters,
planks bending in teak slivers
as the captain quails before starboard
latitudes that suggested paradise.

We left
like any old day or fresh night
into the deep

and found sunken orange
and snake wires tangled around
the frames of dead cars pulling
down the weight of soft shell
memories in twists and turns
of escaped bubbles
in a dead scream never heard
below the waterline's mark.

Light dissolved through the murk
our kerosene spilled like rank particles
into dank seawater,
a greasy wick all that was left
of that proud vessel
as it and man slid down
through ends of light
and the envelope of a maroon
lain in ocean trench
the size of any dead's old star
wrapped in the wormwood
of an afterlife so pressured
that any submarine there
had the chance of a child's drawing
shoved into storm gutter

Like laughter our death bubbled
through Neptune's dead champagne brunch,
our life,
a wedding that never happened much
but in some dream as non-existent
as that St Elmo's Dutchman
flying out on phosphorescence to scorch
the nightwatchmen with boiling radiation
and to scour our rest
with the infection of the mysterious.