Shipwreck Poem Video (MV)

Do not look for a ship in this poem you will not find one
Just the wreck

There is no mention of tumultuous sea journeys or Tempests or Odysseus
Or whales or the stomach of whales
What torments the night to make it dive and rip sails will not be unveiled
Just the wreck

Because this is a shipwreck poem you will find the ship destroyed
Pieces repurposed, bassinets made of driftwood, blood, and salvaged hope
You will be enveloped by the stench of seaweed and vomit
You will find a people stuck, isolated
In an environment not suited for long life
You will fall asleep hungry, awaken hungry
Spend the day with your stomach pulling the rope of your tongue
You will be chased
You will run for your life, up crumbling mountains, down filthy stairwells
Live in crumbling housing, panic often, have night terrors in broad daylight

Because so much of a shipwreck poem is to do with delirium
A common symptom of being castaway
You will find sanity in suicide, merciful
You will keep the dead as friends
Religion will be caught between fable, faith, and rage
You will hear screaming and crying
Every so often you will find a floating body face down in the river and
You'll keep drinking
You will build a raft of music, wax melded, broken beats mended, needle
And threaded into beautiful collages, the world will listen in devotion
But ignore your cry for help

Let me tell you how little is written by born castaways
Because this is my shipwreck poem, a 1980's baby, up the street of
New York City where i grew up, you'd find a hollow library
Where my overdue mother resorted
To fish out books from the garbage to nourish a young poet
An avenue that harbored the source outbreak of the war on drugs epidemic
Scattered puddles of green glass bottles, emptiness, the note
You will find people substitute anything for a boat

For those of us born of this wreckage, you will find our muscles sore
Spasms from unremembered storms
You will find our arms like broken oars make escape hard
How we try, only to redesign the same disaster because the wreck
Is all we know

Because this is a shipwreck poem, most important of all, you will face an
Ocean
That swallows and hoards all that is meant for you