Water Tears

Picture source: Environmental Investigation Agency

Scattered in the flotsam
of our own shipwreck of esteem,
I can see how life can
somehow
seem incomplete.
Justification
floats out from our shallow pool
of superficiality, disregard,
and disrespect; strange metals
and plastics –
sculptures of ourselves,
and our unpardonable behaviours
swirl with sea foam –
we fill the voids with the dregs
of our existence.
The fluidity of consequence,
in simple but ravenous
undercurrents pull us under
to a place
where belched out excuses
of ‘I am below a place
and misunderstood,’ are not allowed,
the only clarity down here
is trapped in clear plastic,
iconic, ritualistic fodder,
worship’s relics to profit gods –
plastic gold of fools
becomes hung on the sacrificial
lambs running out of space, blood and life,
outside of our own shallow, murky,
self obsessed, oceanic fervour
tinged with a malevolence 
hitherto unseen in these new depths
where rays beam full with sharks
who filter a radiant bask
and swim with my mind’s eye;
black on black,
soulless sonar,
driven into deeper waters
away from clarity, away from us,
where clouded,
dense echoes
are tumultuous shadow
in this shadow world.
Linear fish guard the surface –
it is out of bounds
to us – above is a means to
sink lower –
so I bask with humility
in the disharmony
of sand beds, cry at dystopian crustaceans
and life within the order of cetacea,
and nod their dismay,
bothered once in while
by passing bubbles; inside them
subtle, pearlised ironies pop
when sperm whales wink at me and say,
“Only we should get to crap
in the ocean. Pass it on!”