One of many
Were you searching
for one just like me
or was it
mere serendipity
awash at your feet
Your eyes drink me in
Fingers trace every curve
I take delight in your handsome grin
Raise me close to your ear
and my whisper you’ll hear,
“Keep me always… object of affection.
Keep me…
even if only part of your collection.”
The Hits Keep On Coming
God's radio is my seashell, broadcasting the world to me. A cosmic background radiation of all Creation. It is the turntable of the sacred.
It is polytonal, and it takes a special ear to hear the broadcast, to pick out the important news while dismissing the things that do not matter.
It is panharmonic and discordancy flows to me in tandem with the euphony, requiring a special gift for melody to hear the sorrowful songs of those who suffer with the contrapuntal fugues of the joyous songs sung by those who live in euphony.
It is pandimensionally polyphonic: a poet hears it better than a musician. Oscillations are the breaths of the Divine, and the smallest bones in my body reverberate with the greatest sound in our universe.
One day I'll have the courage to lift a second seashell to my other ear, too. Dare I risk stereo?
Echochamber
There is nothing left, inside my walls
No thrumming life, no tiny two-beat heart
The sea has carved away even the harshest edges,
Not even leaving behind the memory of being
Just soft impression - no more teeth, no more struggle
All is returned to the waves, the womb
As you lift the empty vessel to your ear,
listen to the roar of the sea
and remember that we are not so different
life along the shoreline
Nestled in the moist sand, I breathe in the balmy summer air, feeling the occasional spray of salt water across my tea pink shell, as I watch the sun go down, looking as glorious as ever. I can feel the warmth emanating from the glowing orb. It feels like I've been cocooned, sheltered by its embrace for an eternity. But by nightfall, the couples have gone home and the sky has turned a midnight blue. There is a deafening silence broken only by the chirping of the crickets and the rustling of bushes nearby. Meanwhile, I lie embedded within the sand, staring up at the frosty stars, wishing for the hours to go by quickly so that it is sunset once again and I can bask in its warmth, for as long as it shall remain.
This is what life is like along the shoreline. It is lonely, yet peaceful. It is monotonous, yet exciting. It is the only life I have ever known but I have never wished for another, because I am content. I am content with my solitary existence along the shores of this beach, because it makes me feel special, like a spectator being entertained with their very own private show. I am content with the biting cold that is only intensified by the lukewarm ocean, washing over me every once in a while, because it increases the longing I have for the sun and makes the fruit of my patience all the more sweeter. I am content because I get to live out my days surrounded by nature before I erode with time or am sweeped up by a particularly strong wave and carried away to lands unknown.
I am hollow, empty. There was nothing left to live for. Nothing else to try when you have tried everything. I wanted to get back so bad.
The ocean called me. She mocked me with her majestical beauty. I loved her and everything she hid inside her. So much beauty tangled up with the demons she hid inside. My God, I loved her as I had never loved anything in my life.
She tossed me out. I begged her to take me back and I know she heard me. She was right fucking there! She stretched out before me. Her waves gently touched me. They were like text messages sent to taunt me and keep me hoping. Gentle kisses on the cheek from a lover now claiming we were nothing together.
"It's not you" she seemed to say. "I'm too filled up with other things to allow you in."
I was just another distraction, another burden weighing her down. I laid under the stars and felt the slow hot fingers of death creep in and begin to strangle me. I was nothing without her. I literally couldn't breathe without her. The saddest thing is I actually expected her to sweep me into her embrace and save me at the last moment. But, she did nothing.
My body may have began to dry out as it was picked apart by gulls and ants. Their laughter and gnawing echoing through me as I died right there in front of her. I'd seen her do it to others and managed to always believe she wouldn't do it to me.
People press me to their ear and then cup it to the ear of their child. " Listen, you can hear the ocean."
Yes, you can hear her. My love for her transcends my death. That sound was my sound. Her sound was my favorite song. I left it behind when they were done tearing me apart. I locked it in the depths of my shell to try and profess my love for her even as I died.
Mischelle Speaks of Blessed Silence
Tell me, you have wondered about the Afterlife, have you not? and collecting all these seashells over time, have you never but once asked yourself? What is this, in such abundance scattered, left and right?
It is i, death. Lend your ear again. Let me pull from your depth the deafening silence that swirls down my smooth, pink-tinged mouth and neck... The sound of drowned souls that will never come back to land or sea.
No, your time is not neigh; and please don't be sad, for us.
The spines and spirals upon my housings are not a cage, nor labyrinth; but a fortress to protect the tired and meek.
They have served their time.
In the safety of my shells, they have their eternal rest.
07.17.2023
Make Me Human (Seashell) challenge @ChrisSadhill
From Flesh to Shell (we are all as one)
And in one hefty, mighty wave from my only home, the ocean,
my fate began
in a descent shoreward.
The moist grains of sand that I landed on
were not where I remained –
for in one gentle, childlike scoop,
her hands cusped together
and I slid in with ease towards her palms.
I gazed into the deep blue eyes of this woman
who had stirred the waters of the shore
just to chance a clutch at me;
and what a wonder she was of her own, I thought!
The lines of her eyes, and of her lips,
were pale and fading as a grin came upon her.
How she found a beauty in me,
and I, her.
She gently turned me over
and a tight grip of twine fastened me now for her style.
She tied the ends together,
and from there I fell –
to forever lay now in the hollow pit between her delightful breasts.
And oh, how I could feel the liveliness in her
as each heart beat pulsed!
Remembrance of those long ago days
(the ones bathed in an innocence and fulfillment
that once animated the womb of me) –
I let them die
as I cleverly stole from the wishes of hers.
And just so feminine and graceful she was in her walk –
how I’d want to be if I were a human girl.
Though,
if we were of the same existence,
there is much to be a reflection of us.
The pattern of my own aged crow’s feet,
that lies upon my weathered
and aged little shell I comfort myself in,
well, I could mirror this woman in face.
And like my newly found friend,
I can also be heard humming softly with the seasons,
if you only bring me closer and listen
to the melody that hides within me.
It is that which gossips from a whispered echo
where life’s bittersweet adventures can be heard.
And for each of us,
the armor that we masquerade to the earth –
so hard and solid, yet fanciful on the outside –
is much, much more responsible
for the valuable pureness it harbors internally.
A one-of-a-kind spirit
that not the skies nor the oceans could tame.
And whether capsuled behind flesh or shell,
and no matter the millions of years between our origins,
from one living being to another –
a boomerang of respect, and gratitude for life,
bonds us eternally together.