Mermaiden
She sits on an pearled imperial rock,
scaly buttocks snug against the shells.
Limpets lickle at her fingers, pedicure
her tail-tips. She sighs, tastes the salt
on her lips, thinks of sailors, a mariner
with tousled chest and blue-irised Irish eyes,
sweet matelot. a sea-dog she will leash
with the Hokusai whorls of her hair,
burnished like sunbeams on wave-curls.
She combs her locks with honeyed words,
blows kisses at the lusty gulls, hears their shrieks
climax on a hump of landed orca.
Her heart is brine, harder than Lot's wife,
baked and caked by long years on the flats
of water. Her eyes are liquid, like her song.
Beware of her beauty, as cruel as the ocean,
as eternal as the wash of waves, the wane
of shore. She is in her element, you are mere
mammal, juicy and ungilled. A subtle mind is nothing
more than tissue. She will lace it on the swell
like marbled fat on meat. She will dissolve you
into her queendom. You will spill guts, groin
and begetting into a sudden maelstrom
of sharp reflected stars.
grasshopper
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