I. Tide
Sleeping, breath rolls in waves,
surf on the shore of dreams.
Moon hauls the dreamer’s water, phase by phase;
kelp-dark thought uncoils, opens like a palm.
Thought-flotsam the shore collects,
wrack from teeming verdant life.
The dreamer buries treasure;
the woken mind finds a chest—
jinni, genius, jest—
Ozymandias trailing his measure across wet sand.
Slowly, tide erases all it gave,
back to sea, watery grave.
Bone meal, salt, the nameless giving—
dead and dying, pushed up unforgiving.
What the deep swallowed, cold upwelling spends:
light that feeds the living never ends.
II. Upwelling
Dawn cracks night’s shell,
spills yolk across the sand.
Ankle-deep in the dark’s expulsion—
shells, kelp, gull’s hollow wing—
I sift for the chest’s lost gleam.
Jinni yawns, half-smoke, half-jest;
genius folds like a spent wave.
Treasure dulls to trinket in light:
sea-glass ring that crowned a king
who swore his works outlasted tide.
Cold current keeps its vow—
what sank returns as shimmer
on grass blades, veins drinking salt sweet.
I breathe the drowned’s exhaled air,
taste iron, plankton, storm’s dregs.
Shore never cleans; mind never empties.
Footfalls grind old bone to sand;
sea laughs in whitecaps:
Take, reshape, give back.
Ozymandias feeds plankton now,
his colossal sneer dissolved to silicate,
glinting in fish eyes leaping sunward.
Chest lies open, half-buried, half-revealed;
I close the lid on nothing,
walk inland carrying the salt.
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