Excerpt
Ship Amok

Invisible, this viral gas, the leaks,
This system leaking
Down down down
Through the bowels &
Did nobody guess?

The coughing cabin boy,
The captain & his scabs…
Oh, all the new barnacles
Just beneath the surface,
The rooms, the freckled halls
To pour over
Along the skin…

What great waves, what tsunamis
Of silences crash over this bulwark,
But unseen to the senses, busy
Searching for hidden lesions, other
Symptoms to record…

Look-----
These fretting battalions----
Touch-----
These hatches battened &
All the galley is solicitous, whispers
That there really isn’t, no, not
A single danger…

Only nerves are going up the mast now,
Only the ice bergs of prowling ghosts
Thin as sonar
From the boiler, through the pipes &
Out each heating duct….

But it is contained as a garbage barge
Making a dock of the ocean.
But it is locked as refugees in a chain
Exiled to salt.

Float on, coast, drift, strange Peter Pan
Vessel, shining like a diamond, blind
To itself. Shine on pale as death then
In the submersion of fish lips, eely octopi
Eyes & fathoms & fathoms of the still
Stilling quiet