Bearing Witness to a Swamp Siren

Swamp Siren!...Her arms are like shrub stems!...arching...sinuous...seeking life

Outside the undergrowth that never ceases to push up. 

I stumbled upon her by mistake on a unlikely day of strolling. I was fishing for a place to flirt with my allusions of Death.

Swamp Siren!...Her flighty digits nervously stroke the bog, as an echo of frogs returns to find us in our contemplation.

With each ripple in her pool, I become aware of the quick dry cement fix of this wizened waif's particular fate. I felt reality set in.

She's a permanent inmate!...A squatter at the gate......Tenant of a death-like drama. She

warily darts in and out of the sauna of an endless, boiling day, but it's much too late. I've fixed upon her static form, briefly, before the shadows quickly devour her again.

Swamp Siren signals me with a passing wink, from her post, before she dissipates into a mystic steam...I think she lives inside a swollen dream that few can navigate or claim to see. I use to think that this was all my puckered pores could live for, was her wild heart. I have grown beyond these cat-tails, to my agonized chagrin. At least I dreamed I've grown.

Later in the night, rain will be most likely be furiously pelted down upon her exhausted frame. She is beauty incarnate. Her hangs down around her naked breasts, and legs. Raven black, and draped on all the different forms of life. She has spread her heart and soul, via psychic bundles, through a multitude of trade winds…She aims to leave her permanent inscription, but it seems for now that she remains a slave to routine. The flowers bow to her, and love her. They know her by a different name. Her environment of despair is consistent enough to bring her a small comfort. What seems beautiful, yet maddening to me, is far beyond any feeble attempts of understanding now. I need to succumb to her whims one final time, and consume the goblet of her pain so I may truly bear witness. My soul is still in disagreement.

I wish I could persuade her to dismount from where she's poised. It's her choice to be a sinking Captain on this fated Boat of Death. Below my breath I wish her a safe passage from our World to the Next. This flimsy action is not nearly enough to assuage my battered heart, however. I promise that I will return, at the heart of the dark, to the place where she remains tethered to her obsession with the Never Was. It's here that I will take deliberate stabs at discovering if there is anything I can do to guide her way to freedom. I know this is her habitat though, and she has grown to except the everyday extremes that are fatally unhealthy. She's starting to go grey around the gills, though she is still quite young. O, how I long to cease this stream of powerful black water, Mojo driven, and envisioned by her semi-poisoned dreams. However painful it did seem, I ultimately had to turn away, and swim outside her treacherous ring of islands. I saw a way to dream beyond the ring, and left before my spirit had the chance to fuse forever to the swamp.

For:Sitkah Sage

©

2017

Bunny Villaire