poppies and seawater, understanding.

when i was young, a boy of three
or six times the distant sea; i had a difficult
time understanding why
when the tide was high,
my skin would bleed. i didn’t know
who dictated that my throat
would burn and sleep would evade my
weary body

each time the poppies
grew pink.

if it’s a disease: i don’t want it. with illness
in my lungs
and a book on
children with magic in their
fingers, i neglected to perceive
that i was more than one with nature;
conflicted and tossed by
the waves, hurt and scarred by the
poppies when they
flowered and turned the color
of the

exhausted and sleepy
whites of my
blind eyes.

music haunted my mind, of a thousand
violin’s filaments breaking to the sound
of streams at a standstill:
of poppy hearts lying dead on
a frozen anthill;
of an aching in my veins
when winter took the flushing flowers – the frostbitten
toes of the white
innocent poppies
my mother clinched inside her
diamond fingertips
(for safe keeping).

we didn’t call my father father; he was simply
hunter, and that was his name: a man of the
woods, a man that stomped on
poppies that had just come into bud,
a man who didn’t appreciate the drifts
lapping at the skin-silky shore
of which our lakes
drank in the atlantic.

hunter, as we called him; or disaster, as our mother
liked to say when
she cried her crimson eyes to sleep,
slept on the hard-as-burnt-bread couch cushions,
and sang to my sister of
failing bodies and tiring hobbies. of killing
animals for food
and wondering why water excites the palate
so passionately after you’ve
slaughtered something furry.

but when autumn settles in my bones,
and the poppies that once burst into red,
vibrant murder
have been discovered post-mortem,
in snapshotted, violent rigor mortis:
i must admit –

i’ve never tasted pacific seawater.