gravity carried us the way we once carried the sea

I found one of your messages
But it wasn’t in a bottle.
A dove
Dyed love.
I’m staying up late to
Write this
About your big-city dreams
With brick-wall apartments
And after-shave collars,
Social constructs and pink salt.

I bought sunglasses tinted pink
For a point
So people don’t waste time
On people like me—
People with hope.

So why did you?

What’s the point of messenger pigeons
If they get here on time?
Wasn’t that supposed to explain why
We were found beneath the sea?

you were the only ache i had
when i wasn't aching
at all.
nothing pleases me more
than to know you found at least,
a bit of me somewhere
crusted in the oceans' sadnesses
but i am still just
one
of so many.

time spent away
is never time wasted.
our pink salts sweetened
when we fused our temperatures
and it was fiery until the
end.

i am lukewarm now;
the Atlantic disowned me.

i wrote letters in hopes
of finding you doing the same but not out of
spite,
no, my dear, never
out of spite.
we were found beneath the sea
because we never
belonged
anywhere else.

i am a siren detached
from the comforts of the seas
and you
are still
my only refuge.

So why, Love, do you write
In only un-caps-lock?
Reckless tyranny of the ocean
Is not warmer than the seas.
Stars do not shine
Nor planets dance
To give comfort
They fuck comets to warm up, themselves,
And all that we do,
We do to not go gentle into that goodnight.

The seashores, shells, and seahorses cry
To uncrust the un-caps-lock;
I collected the fragments of ocean trenches:
pink salt.
Pink
Sunglasses and sirens,
Spite and the contours of the nape
Of the white beaches of your neck

I must admit
And I’m ashamed to say,
But I was not found,
I was searching,
Scared to find and grasp, but you needed
The strength of a lonely
Himalayan climber
almost drowned in the ocean.

I am lukewarm now;
I fled from the snowy heavens.

It was the gentile blaze
Our hearts yearned for through
Warm bones and chilly muscles.
I am a cave cut
Into by the ocean
And you
Are still
My beloved refugee.


_{"They carried the sky. The whole atmosphere, they carried it, the humidity, the monsoons, . . . all of it, they carried gravity." ~ Tim O'Brien}