The Shark and the Ghost Ship

~ The Shark and the Ghost Ship ~

With blood falling from her fingertips
She stepped into the sea
With tears cascading from her tortured eyes
She turned but never looked at me
With heaven fading from her torn disguise
She tried but couldn’t speak to me
With crimson spraying from her severed veins
She sank into the ocean deep, and drifted far away

Alone between the sand and sea I faced a sad and certain choice
To stay and live or leave and die, and then I heard a silent voice
Instructing me to build a ship with dynamite below the deck
With fuel for an endless cruise and bread for one trip there and back
             An underwater palace formed in shadows then will take you in
             A warm eternal wedding song awaits you at your journey’s end

In six days and nights I had finished the work on the white wooden ship, and I christened it “Black”
I fashioned the anchor, a circular magnet encompassed by stars in perpetual motion
Forty-one weeks on the uncharted ocean I stayed on her course through the storms of the vast
She left me a trail of blood and I followed
To seek out the damned in this hopeless expanse…

Then I arrived at the end
Her body lay twenty-four fathoms below me, a fraction of time to descend
But then like a rift in the very same moment, in morbid amazement I looked to the west
The fin of the shark deemed a paradigm legend appeared on the fringe of the blinding horizon
Drawn by the source of the same blood as I, to inflict jagged wounds by unwilling submission
Then to engorge on her bones and her flesh

Afraid I knelt in anguished prayer but offered praise for what I had
In folded hands, a silver knife, for bread and now for sacrifice
To save her life
The way was made
I dropped the anchor off the edge
I left a note
I stained the blade
I stepped onto the starboard ledge

With blood falling from my fingertips
I dove into the sea
With demons tearing through a dreamer’s guise
Her strain arose inside of me
With hell enlightening my tortured eyes
I gained the wisdom of the unknown deep
With scarlet pulsing from my opened veins
I lured the blood-starved shark to me, and led him far away

In dim rays of twilight, in sight of the island, I met face to face with my unholy fate
Jaws of the shark came together as one like a cold iron maiden of razor-sharp teeth
Shivers of fear turned to tyrannous pain as my body was chomped into warm chunks of meat
Leaving a torrent of rose-colored blood through the coral beneath, in the dorsal fin’s wake

But down in the dark in the depths of the shark an imperial chess match of kings had begun
Both of them bathed in the blood and and the spoils of victory scorned by impending defeat
Both of them chained to the beautiful plane of creation made waste by the perilous beast
Both of them driven by force to the sand, never to enter the waters again…

Alone below the ocean waves surrounded by the Earth’s decay
She lay beside the fallen anchor lost in thoughts of disarray
To leave and live or stay and die, a choice the same, of buried sin
Her soul condemned by ever-calling echoes never washed away
But there was yet another choice, to stay and die but live again
A silent voice inviting her from shadows on a palace grave

             Rejoice for what you cannot see, my escort has arrived
             To carry me to Paradise, to seek and there to find
             To bind my lonely spirit to the kingdom once prepared
             A kingdom by the sea
             Inside of you, surrounding me
             Enshrouded by your likeness in the promise I will there receive

She stared into the surface light as death compelled her eyes to close
But as her body decomposed a dormant seed of life awoke
A virgin formed
Her heart the same
She climbed up by the anchor line
The sun was bright
Her tears were warm
She knelt beside the note to pray

Shaded in gray were the words of a song
On cherubim’s wings over tables unseen
Enclosed by the lines of a seven-point star,
“Memento Mori, in the light and the dark
To find your way back, you won’t need a map
I’ll leave a trail of blood for you to follow
Reach the beginning to find what I dream
One breath of life brings the end of all pain…”

             …and then my mirage becomes real

             Somewhere near and somewhere far
             Far away from where you are
             Caught behind the gates of sorrow, sealed with your name

             The slaughter where the siren sings
             The wind beneath the vulture’s wings
             The Christ in all the Devil’s dreams in endless crucifixion scenes
             For man to see what angels see
             Through branches on a barren tree
             The temple where the child bleeds for endless voices in between

             Somewhere near and somewhere far
             Deep inside of where you are
             There my body shall depart from underneath your beating heart
             Sheltered now in warm wet shadows, waiting to be born

             From somewhere near and somewhere far
             Hiding me from where you are
             Two as one yet worlds apart collide in one united heart
             Caught inside the chalice of your flesh and bone again divine

She pulled up the anchor and followed my blood against turbulent currents and turns of the tide
Through the portals of time, by a gate to the past leading all the way back to the island she left
The shark lay in ruins but nowhere in sight, with insatiable pride he was buried and gone
His kingdom had come to a desolate end and in judgment his will was undone to the last
She guided the ship to the midst of the beach, to the site of the breach that was still soaked in red
Watching the waves of the ocean grow calm
Hearing a love song, in silence inside

She left the ship and walked alone along the edge of endless sea
While in the hold below the deck the anchor cast out rings of light
A glowing stone of silver-white that glistened under gasoline
Which sprayed from fractured casks unseen on saturated dynamite
The ship exploded into flames, ignited by a simple spark
With smoke in billows black as tar ascending from collapsed remains

             Somewhere near and somewhere far
             Coming back to where you are
             Waiting at the gates of heaven, opening before my eyes
             Opened by the pressure of a love that never died…

She gazed into the distant sky as streams of blood flowed down her legs
And final waves of labor pain brought daylight to my constant dark
The haunted ghost
She brought me forth
Her hands caressed my healed wrists
Her breath was warm
She kissed my lips
I woke from death, she held me close

             Welcome, my love, to Lake Tancia’s shore
             Pass through the edge of eternity’s core
             Born from the darkness, the shark and its carcass
             Killed by my lifeblood, destroyed from within
             Then by an endless force, buried in sand, never to rise anymore

             I died for your breasts, oh my love
             The future that comes from the Eden that was
             Paradise slain by the madness of man
             Lost but retained in a temporal plan
             Fallen but destined again to return, never to die anymore

             All I see and all I seem
             Is now a dream within your dream
             A reflection, but of who?
             New creation, born of you