No Escape, No Return

I claw and scrape, sing and scream

A siren drying

Gasping in the noontime sun

The tune of captivity gradually fades

To a chant of liberation

☀︎⋆.ೃ࿔🧜🏻‍♀️🏖️*:･

Moisture is readily exchanged

With sizzling air, setting plumes of steam

Billowing from tail to hair

Slowly desiccating in

My scramble to escape

☀︎⋆.ೃ࿔🧜🏻‍♀️🏖️*:･

On flipper and elbow I must crawl

Salt crystallizes in sea green veins

As I wade into a merciless death

Despite all hope and fine polishing grit

☀︎⋆.ೃ࿔🧜🏻‍♀️🏖️*:･

Unable to fight the humorless gulls

Plucking scales off one by one

I toss them, glinting

In the firelight of futility

☀︎⋆.ೃ࿔🧜🏻‍♀️🏖️*:･

As the kittiwakes mock and taunt

Their laughing squawk

Uncannily mingles with

My tortured song

As the day dawns on this

Glistening mandala of harpy slaughter

Lines wrought of Iridescent flakes

A haunted shanty awash in spiraling melody

Pours across the shining shore

☀︎⋆.ೃ࿔🧜🏻‍♀️🏖️*:･

The tide constantly recedes

I never see the tree line

It continually creeps

Just out of sight, always out of reach

As I hobble on hand and fin

Towards the sanguine horizon

Tantalizing my sense of survival

Driven to persist in this fruitless Odyssey

☀︎⋆.ೃ࿔🧜🏻‍♀️🏖️*:･

My lifelong curse and castigation

To never reach the safety of

The calling sea

Never feel her aqueous caress

I hear her whispers

Her bewitching hymns

Yet I’ve been forced to survive

On just the rushing of the surf

The saline scent of oceanic brine

☀︎⋆.ೃ࿔🧜🏻‍♀️🏖️*:･

Predators may snap

The sun can scorch

I shall not die captive

Better I’d bake

Alone on the shore

K.B. Silver