A Boy’s Plea to Water

This seascape—tinted with the yellow breath of the dying sun—
spreads into a wiggling waistline

of the sea lap-dancing the shore to earn her bodies
of drowned immigrants—their faceless mass washed into the dailies.

Skyclad, I cast aside my bamboo flute, curio, amulet, fishing
hook—figurine of a broken-winged albatross, a pair of worn out

flip-flops, beside the underbelly of a canoe,
like a cocoa pod half-buried in the sand.

Here, I open a hard clam in a palm, and whisper a prayer
bead into it. close it like a secret

chest, and let it submerge as the dead
weight of my faith for country with the beating heart of doubt.

See, I cannot stop gazing at the night sky
to trace supernovas into the face of God.

I’m the boy who loads a paper ferry with his wishes
to sink it wherever there is a pulse of a dead man’s dream.

Carry me. carry me away from here, where;
I. the mouths in the shack behind me

call me father, fishbones choking their syrinxes—
their voices like withered petals stuck in a woodwind;

II. mockingbirds, in our compound, nest in the fruitless mango tree
whose roots are entangled with my umbilical cord.

Carry me away on this driftwood, west of my compass, to a soil
the flower I carry in my breast pocket cannot be pollinated by a rifle.