Don’t tell me this is a sailor’s cry
The yearnings of a seafaring heart
When a salty beard lends no flavor
To his raucous and lonesome tongue.
But tell me in delicate
Inebriated kisses
As yellow light spills through the cracks of a closed door
That it’s only the howl of the wind through a sail
Hissing, “isolation,
Bewitchery,”
Sending word of the messenger’s death
And giving my heart the music
To dance as a marionette.
This is not the longing in a sailor’s soul
Not why he mirrors the stars and the sea.

But the messenger is dead.
I killed her at daybreak.
She moaned, “isolation,
Trickery,”
In the still-fresh mists of morning.