Poem: Seasick and Songful

O the hilly hellscape of the heart, heartsick, homesick,
seasick, sick at sea and heart, whether waves or hills,
the body flounders, heart spills, and the mind mutinies—
mountains, it forms, impossible to scale.

and I, still here, in the vale
of half-apologies and hope half stale—
Lo, the masochist returns to the sites of sorrow
where old agonies infinitely unfurl
in some grim tomorrow,
future-past tense world—

what a shame it is
that we are human,
what a shame

that I am, I say, I declare or pray;
I am tossing on an ocean of treachery—
O the heart is hilly, hurt and has every
hole patched up, every hatch latched,
where every agony is stacked
neatly, ever and never tossed about
by the jostling kinetic world—

chronically seasick and always at sea—
some god, in its infinite forethought
ought to have wrought us from some
other matter than this—this mess of flesh—
something that neither breaks nor wears away,
impervious to the perturbations of a day.

The vocal cords are grief-catchers,
and all that’s caught is then exposed
in a tiny museum of frail dispatchers,
sinews stretched and heart enclosed—
what a shame it is that we are fragile,
what a shame, that I am, am human,
all, every inch, what a shame.