Seaside

 

Last night I read Lorca in the bathtub
Three candles and an incense lit
My cigarette blending with steam and bubbles
Lavender and Epsom sinking to the bottom
The eucalyptus soothes my old needle scars

Water is the vehicle for oil paint
The medium where I have always lost
White powder easily dissolves
But brown needs a mild acid and flame
The ocean never took me like I planned

Opium followed Rimbaud and Verlaine
Through vagabond steps of dissonance
Cocteau said living is a horizontal fall
I imagine swept waves in the horizon
Floating into a collapsed plunge of salt

Shame is to love unreciprocated
To sacrifice everything without verdict
I traded syringes for springtime cherry blossoms
But there is no other extreme isolation
Than the loneliness submerged in water

T.William Wallin-Sato is a Japanese American freelance journalist who covers the criminal justice system through the lens of his own experience being incarcerated. His first book of poems, Bamboo on the Tracks: Sakura Snow and Colt Peacemaker, is forthcoming.
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