shipping news by Sam Ledger

I laced you to the ships foremast, passing rope between your ribs and tying a binding knot. You never
realised we were at sea until this moment. I felled the oak in the far right corner of the garden to craft
a carrack with rusted nails and sails stitched from bled on bedding. I liked the elements of renaissance
in the craft and named her Mary Rose.

You said shadows were too deep          
and the cold was making your                    bones rattle.

I cut out the shape of branches and leaves and roots and my own silhouette standing amongst
browning acorns from news papers. The scissors were blunt and each of your words barbed burrowed
under my skin. I had never wanted to scratch my own flesh from my bones until that moment but my
finger nails were chewed to the quick.  Yellow sulphurs stench wafted on cooling air of late autumn.
Ignition of emotion would have created more commodious elements of warmth, stretching into an
effortless eternity of unconscious contentment.

 I have only now fires of hell to warm me and words
of Milton bleed from my lips.

Carbon has a sense of weightlessness about itself, a belief in a freedom flesh could not promise much
less deliver. My stomach turned inside out, finally I consume. Acidity bites organs, muscles, sinews and
synapse and nerves wired incorrectly, firing misleading statements from head to heart. I judge it seeks
sights of oceans and scents of good clean sea air.

All this longing for sailors gone too long in rusted vessels riddled with holes and we have only buckets
to bail out  guilt as it rushes over the bow.  Would you have had it any other way.

I was always cruel in my forgetfulness as I was in love.