Aconitum-Napellus

It’s Eurovision! Time to get drunk and watch people singing strange, bad songs!

May 18th

So, you decide to sink,

silt-blessed. Let water wash

your arms, your lungs.

Your breaths are sand,

alveoli caverns for protozoa.

So, in turn, your legs become spars,

your clothes sail-cloth moved by tides.

Your bones will be coral, branched,

picked white, a driftwood not flung up.

So your hair is seaweed, played in,

a forest for fish. Your hands are starfish,

your eyes anemones starting out,

swollen by the wash of waves. So

this is your death. You chose beauty,

a shipwreck under sea. You chose

to be a home for tendrilled life.

A whale-road place, a seafarer’s return.

.

Conversely, there is this.

You are a wreck. No more.

A secret to be found out by hands,

A bloated thing, a half-graved corpse.

You are the worst day in someone’s life,

a sea of grief, a reservoir.

You are the dirty job, short-strawed,

failing in a diver’s hands.

The putrid, swollen nightmare.

You are a waste, a wastrel thing.

Your eyes are saps for silt,

your mouth a vortex gaping wide.

All your thoughts turned in and stopped.

You are a passing pity.

So this is it. Your life no more.

A fleeting forgotten thing,

turned into an abyss.

May 17th

The stillness now is this.

A time to lie, proterozoic,

a silt-pressed cell, waiting for

oxygen to gather, waiting

for life to push its redness into rock.

Something will spring itself to life,

dividing, multiplying,

grasping air and breathing in

and laying down the frame for

a fossil future. Later

I will curl, an ammonite,

thankful for the warmth,

and things will come of this

in shallow seas.

Later I will unfold

into a long-limbed creature,

a sharpened mind, to

hands with jointed fingers,

pointing tools, to a mouth and tongue

and forward looking eyes.

Later I will rise.