sea dream

A Sea Dream.

She noticed the basking shark was wounded,

weeping vaginal blood.

The tall man in a fedora whispered as he passed,

and she blushed.

The horizon was a hazy green line dipped in red.

She had been there since morning

searching for love,

and found it

from a six-pack merman offering solace

as he rode on the silvery

back of a ray.

As he approached, the sun at his back,

she moaned and threw out her arms

like a supplicant.

Complete at last, the sand grasping at

her shoeless feet, she sank

towards the earth’s distant core

using her arms as uncertain ballast.

She awoke with a shiver

brushed away the sand

and headed back home.

The shark had turned belly-up,

scavenged by seagulls.

Another day-dream enjoyed in the

empty hours between lunch and dinner

between her third cup of tea

and fourth cigarette,

her children snoozing in

the back bedroom. Half-slumbering

in a town barked at by bothersome seagulls

where an unencumbered sun

set on a postcard shoreline.

Planning the rows of petunias to be

planted by the hedge,

making shopping lists,

writing novels, never to be published,

staring out of her windows at the sea

she waited for her husband’s return,

tedious evenings of T.V.

and coition under the brightly coloured duvet.

The waves that overwhelmed her, flooding her senses,

were her own. The man

in the fedora had made her smile.