The Human, The Fish, and The Ocean

Like boulders placed on bony shoulders

Laden with the crushing weight

I shout out against the pain

Knowing not that I am mute

Comes on the rope

Strapping these stones to me

"Hold onto them for dear life

Not a single one shall drop" I hear

If I’m not to break the ice

And tumble into unforgiving waters

Time passes

Aches of both the cold and stone

Turn numb with frozen air and frozen feeling

I float further and further

From those who tell me to desperately grasp the stones

On my island of ice, in callous seas

A lone baby fish,

Accompanies my ride, showing me the freedom of ‘swim’

So small

Without burden or weight

And although I may see it's immaculate state,

My ravenous being reaches for the fish

And grabs it with both hands

Takes it out of the water

Puts it back in

Takes it back out

Puts it back in

Takes it back out

Puts it back in

Despite the glimmer of it’s beautiful scales

On the surface of the ceaseless waves

Some force in me desperately craved

Power in my alone helpless state

As if some force in me, swallowed in the numbing pain,

Would do anything to feel some sense of control

To relieve the holding of stones 

Causing anguish to my soul

The fish swims away

No surprise 

For suffering I have caused it

And how hilariously terrible,

And not funny at all

That now the rocks feel bit

By bit

By bit

Heavier

As I approach slightly warmer waters

The aching returns once more,

Stronger this time

Upon my form

And I feel no longer

The desire to escape this powerless state

Instead that I deserved the weight of gravity

In the first place

I lay on the ocean

At peace with my assumption

That this is the meaning of my life

To hold a burden,

Then a greater one

So that I may instead deserve all pain which comes to me

At peace with my assumption

That my life amounts to no more than weighty rocks

Atop a human lost at sea,

The mind stops

Taking my emaciated body to eternal rest

Relieving the world of a shameful birth

Until I awaken to find my island

Has greatly shrunk in size

And that now the heaviness of stone

Pulverizes my flesh

Pressuring my body to fall through

The thin ice which has carried my doom

I will sink, no doubt

With the rope tearing at my skin

Swallowed into the sea below

Now is only left the waiting game

A final breath meekly fills my chest

As the ice breaks

The weight of this human

Plunges into the abyss

Alas, my eyes open once more

To finally allow salty tears

Hidden for so long

To meet the dreaded salty water

But instead of crying in tortuous remorse

The eyes instead silent themselves

Watching the scene around them

And the mouth speaks out instead

In choking sobs

For the water does not painfully pierce the skin

For the view is not without light and shrouded in darkness

For the waves are not menacing and harsh

The warm blue around my immersed self

Reveals to me life

Kept concealed by my only seeing the surface

How the fish of fuchsias and indigos

Of arylide yellows and brilliant carnelians

Of chartreuses and cinnamons and rubies

Of shimmering diamond skins and satin lilac

Embraced around me, so eloquently

I forget my body

Settling at the bottom of these shallow tides

And instead thank the universe

To have never known this peace

Apart from the peace of accepting a meaningless life!

To have never seen such beauty

And believed beauty was in accepting worthlessness

With the stones I let lay upon my body

And ache my soul

When, truthfully

Had I untethered them

And let them roll off me

One by one plopping into the water

I may have not drown here as I am

And sailed to this wondrous grace sooner

Unbound by heavy stones

And still have gone to the same place

That all the adrift and lost

That all the shameful and numbed

That all the pained and laden

Would find themselves

I sleep now, calm with the waves

But find myself now a fish

And swim to a drifting glacier

To speak to a human laden with stone

And remind them of the beauty awaiting them

And although they punish me

Numb with the pain of their own heaviness

Although they take me out of the water

Put me back in

Take me out

Put me back in

Take me out

Put me back in

Although I have shown them the freedom of ‘swim’

They, too, have shown me

That my journey was not to be regretted

For this human
Had no conception of the far-off colorful scene

For this human
Was afraid

For this human
With stones of grief
Starved for the power of love and beauty

Aside from acceptance of worthlessness and meaninglessness

I swim on

With the ebb and flow of the current

Knowing now the greatest beauty

The unimaginable expanse

And unity and community that is

'Ocean'