It travels like the light,
but moves invisibly;
the microscopic particles
slip easily through clay,
encounter no resistance
in the unsuspecting
epidermis, building
into waves, bombarding,
buffeting, at first in play,
bracing as the tide
in some safe, lovingly
remembered bay,
turning without warning
into nightmare surf,
a charged abyss,
an undertow too powerful
and subtle to resist,
the suction of a monstrous
octopus entangling my thighs,
so that I gasp and struggle
like a creature trapped
in fishing-nets, wrestling
with gravity and searing lungs
for one more breath,
to stay afloat, to not succumb
to suffocating, pointless death.
Fields of desolation
inundate the atmosphere, the shore,
well up from the inundated
cavern of the octopus.
Despair wraps tentacles
about my throat
and intertwines with hair,
while in my drowning cochlea
the clamorous, uncaring sea
mocks weakness and ingests each shred
and particle of what I was:
a fragile amphora of love
where sly betrayal made a nest,
transforming light to void then dread:
a funerary urn of loss.