Sher Ting

Have you ever spoken to the ocean?

I once breathed into a conch and heard it whisper

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back. It tells me of how the sky draws its

languishing body into an embrace, of how each ebb

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and flow builds another octave on the harpsichord

of luminosity, circling the shadow of the sun, scintillating

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in the cadence of each spectered beam. It whispers of how

each centimeter beyond the golden shore cradles a thousand

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nouns, sibilates in a verb and splays like an adverb stolen

from the uncharted vocabulary of paradise. The ocean moves

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grazioso, grazing the inverted bowl of a kismet sky, and

tells me how light wanders lost in the hadopelagic abyss, yet

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returns day and day again to break it open like a cipher through

a myth. It tells me how people, like light, are lost, but I am convinced

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I’m not Narcissus. I won’t lose myself falling into mirrored depths,

won’t forget my name by the scar of a hedonic tide. Sometimes,

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the ocean strings my heart by its teeth, yet today, my heart

holds allegiance to nothing, but the indolent mouth of an

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ampersand, the turning of the tide an opening, the yawn of

a shorthand curving

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into the great unknown.

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