Heart at Sea

12.2

mixed media on paper, 2016

30" x 36"

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The sea is caught in a wintry storm.
Violent winds assault its calm. 
Waves are as high as Babel itself; they fill my
ears with an indecipherable language.
My attempts to understand it fails.  
Monsoon, I whisper.
My lips, deepened to a blue-purple from the void of heat, fight
to overcome the onslaught of salt water rushing
into a pair of human lungs on a frantic search for oxygen.
Breathing is labored, thinking is maligned.
Vibrations overwhelm the waters, thunder strikes a hundred times
it seems.
The waves are too powerful.  I am thrown against
rock formations, which I cannot see, only feel.  Sharp.  Jagged.
Crimson begins to pool outward in gradual ripples from
this trembling body.
Fingers make their way to the left of my chest.
An absence.  A pain.
The water rises and an
unfamiliar sound lurches forward that
even the warriors of spring cannot quell. 
Now agony tells me that it is gone.
It is gone.  
My heart.
Carried away by an illusion, carved out by a pair of hands
I once held in love. 
For it was I who had mistaken the wind for a breeze.  I sailed out to sea
unprepared for where it would take my inexperienced vessel.  
Searching now will do no good;
for the sea, so inescapably infinite, has swallowed
my heart, as well as the rest of me.