wreck
drink the lukewarm ocean
as you dive
only to surface to sink
again, with scarcely
the aftertaste of a pool
of dewdrop
tears lapped from the
blade of an upper lip –
surface and sight the
snowbound peaks
beyond Vancouver, a
frosted mirage
beneath a sunlit
cellulose half moon,
to turn and face a bloom
of petal-like
kites handled expertly by
white-haired
white-skinned nudists,
feet lost in whiskery
sand, lean muscles
flushed, toddlers gyrating
to djembe jazz,
newborn-naked like their parents,
platters passed around
with wedges of water-
melon, weed, mushrooms,
tiny liquid vials,
to see grid-like aisles
of tapestries for sale,
geometric as brainwaves
from acid-distance
fluttering om shanti mainsails on lukewarm
winds no longer atrophied
by the inlet, a
liberty also shared by
the whitewashed breaks
whose peaks wade with you
crumbled on sand-
bars that seem to span
from shore to horizon,
to turn and face the
‘clothing optional’ signs
and staircase spiralling
up through the radial
forest – the tree log
seats on which women
meditate, men sunbathe –
human huckleberries
ripening on their bush,
prickly with bark, to see
beaks of gulls thrice the
size of those at home,
the corners of Eckhart
Tolle books buried like
joyous children in the
leathery thicket
of dreadlocks and breasts
that powers
have deigned to allow,
like poisonous
fish, to flourish in a
pond so as not to infest
the nearby ocean – to
slosh through the shin-deep
swale behind the dreaming,
where men are lost
in laughter, a little
girl between two foursomes.
all that’s true is just
as
true reversed –
wouldn’t that be what all
the people here
have stuck up on their
eco-friendly fridges
and gas-guzzling kombi
vans of the higher cosmos?
do those mountains, say,
make you
shiver when you see them,
or are you
warmer inside for no
longer being up there?
climb the stairs, you’ll
see dumb bumper stickers
and the University of
British Columbia.
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