Sometimes Poems Are Meant to Be Whispered

By hellenbarroso, April 10, 2016

She was drowning for so long like a fish out of water choking on the gases in the atmosphere

So she learned how to swim through the buildings and she creeped through the cracks.

I was always a fish not quite belonging in that or the other sea

Yet I could always see me and my scales that reflected everything but never absorbed.

 

So I rode that underwater wave or ripple or have at it whatever you wish

Until I became lost at its ending to swim back but more slowly this time.

I numbed my fins to everything around me and only saw from eyes sideways as I squirmed

Here and there to get a better view—damn how I felt that view in my cartilage.

 

Never enough grown or graceful enough for mermaids to whom Triton instilled an internal compass

But I knew that if I followed the moon she would bless me with her radiance

I was a reflection of her who was herself a reflection of a burning sun

So brightly in her white glow that she only took from something else.

 

Like moon like fish following currents and orbits and reflecting existence in ways unimaginable to so many eyes.