buoy

I’m starlight-soaked. Moonlight-bathed. A foreign sea, with a colder temperature.

The sky fawns so much on lonely water that it becomes the metaphor. 

Whirlpool-washed in lust that even when naked wore love’s face, I was cynic of the sea, 

for coughing, gagging, hacking up the aftertaste of a beached, bleached teenage dream. 

A cruel current and goodbye-waves let that romance swim me to the riptide, 

and I lost faith in love, and lost love for the nighttime sky. 

In salty surrender, I thought the night had cursed the water. I saw synonyms of love and hell.

A buoy called to me, pulsing patient and calm in the foams’ break and swell- 

held and anchored me in whispers, beneath the breath of the breeze oceanic:

“stay safe with me. If you don’t like this world, we’ll create other plans and planets.

Don’t fear the stars, my love, for following them, I found you in constellations.

There’s no heaven or otherwise that I wouldn’t move,” he spoke in bona fide consolation. 

When he said, “don’t fear the moon, for it stays always, as will I.”

My heart sung out a draft, 

in metaphors to the dark: 

speaking something special of my love, for that buoy and the sky.

© Mollie Mardel