Part One

The sea stretched out forever,

A wet skin’s taut embrace of mystery

Shielding with wave and foam

The fragile fabrications of our dream.

Above it, touching it all,

The patient eye with golden rays

Would penetrate that blue skin.

But his arrows are refracted

By angles of wave,

Are unceremoniously committed

To depths and dimensions

Of subsurface dissipation 

And are gulped into the bellies

Of disinterested fish.

Between that solitary golden eye

And the seething blue waters

A pelican pays silent homage

To the mystery

With long wing shadows

Gliding sharp and black

Across white sands and surf.

The mystery itself is his ambulate altar.

Ever moving in excursive flight

He who never seeks an altar’s site

Accomplishes all activity upon 

The altar of the All.

The perpetual pyre of sea and sky,

The taut blue skin,

The heavens’ fiery orbal eye,

Send bone, fin, scale and shell

To every beach profusely.

And we of the dream see more.

Across her fertile, floral floor

Of aqua-fern and fish-fin flare

We seek the sea-womb’s lubrant door

In star-shaped fish and mermaid hair.

An Hermetic Island Part Two: 

Island Identity

This has been oft’ spoken

And is true:

No man is an island.

Yet islands are forever there,

Adrift amid flotsam and

Unrevealed currents,

Shored round about by

Splashing, waving visitations

Of windy entities,

As Id and Neptune

Send up from green fathoms

Seashells, secrets, and swaying selves 

As Surfs upon seclusions. 

I have heard the sounds of islands

Carried on gullwing like a stack of sky,

Running in sandpiper strides, a

Rhythm tuning time with tides.

I have heard the voices of islands

Being buoyed on leap and lapse of wave,

Cresting, lunging at shorelines of sublimity,

Ebullient in the wake of time,

Assaulting churned shores,

Thrashing, screaming into an island

Which I’ve seen in you

That it might be seen in me.

Nature gulps identity, islands, and

Oceanic atonement, tossing 

Granite piles in shallow seas.

Islands are forever there, trident-pricked

And peopled. Even Neptune entertains Id.

From far climes the sailor soul is summoned

With a stranger’s “hello” on a sandy street,

And Id plays a trick on the trident saying:

“Our days are likened to the sea

And we to a reach of sands

Who’d shore up into seven names

What the tides pull through our hands.”

An Hermetic Island:

Part Three

I, admittedly deceived, relinquish

Now those subtle sermonings of 

Saint and street

Which bought behind the crimson veil

Acceptance at a bargain and

Brought, as April all men’s hail,

Allegiance to our ground.

I lied.

No man is an island, it is true,

Yet islands are forever there,

Adrift amid the flotsam and 

Unrevealed currents.

I bask beneath a high wind

And clouds which grace no

Continental shore or brotherhood.

By day the sky is termed

Where fails my eye,

Where kisses of the heavens 

Around about me touch the sea.

By night my eye is filled

With stars and the solitude

Of galaxies as breakers from 

Unseen depths spill moons,

Comets, planets and suns upon

The crystal beaches of my face.

I lied.

The scorpiotic mind of madness

Being approached by minds 

Reveals bold Neptune’s breath

Behind the sail before his

Puffy cheeks, and

Reveals men in purposeful

Abandonment of familiar shores

And familial mores,

Men who drift ‘round about

The coral and the sands which, 

If not myself, yet remains the

Ground by Time placed

In this place

Where I look outward to the sea.

I lied.

All man is not my brother.

Who is this approaching by

The sea?

The pelican sees the 

Sword and spade on 

Decks of salt-sprayed wood

As a ship hulls upon a beach.

Souls posing as sinless sailors

Seek boots upon my ground.

Palm and petal bow beneath

That very human need to

Pierce, pan and plunder

All the sun hath wrought

To satisfy an endless greed

And a cursed thirst. 

I see

A company adrift on fear and 

Anger, keeping their purpose

Sheathed in its necessary blindness.

Strange creatures, these once-bornlings.

Strange in their explorations 

Of my mysteries;

Strange in their incantations 

To proprieties; and

Stranger still in their

Desperations from avoidance.

These are not my brothers;

This is not my kind or likeness.

I lied, lied when the sun 

Sparked in the zenith of my pride

And cast my shadow

Upon the face of the earth;

Lied, lied to the unsatiated

Shadow of my being. 

My brother is the twice-born,

The thrice-borne child of the 

Four cornerstones.

My brother, oh my brother!

You ride the bow-wave as

Ten million phosphorescent 

Sea stars in the night!

You list in the waters 

Which surround me.

You rise in my cup as I

Draw from the well in 

My island. 

You waft from the clouds, a

Mist upon my face,

And I give you my love

As a river.