Town Drowned

Wrote this really quick after a shower. Not the best, but I just wanted to get it down.

I once knew this girl from town who drowned in the sea.

She got in a fight with her mom over dirty dishes in the sink. It was like a spat between high school sweethearts, brought up again at a reunion, that had been over for a long time and they just hadn’t realize it.

So she left, slammed the door, and the panes rattled as if teeth from the shark’s mouth she just climbed out of. And she walked down by the beach, the salt air to settle her mind, the sand to release her energy, the water to lap up her fire.

She saw her reflection in the waves, and then it became two. It slowly morphed into one again

and quickly she was plunged into them.

They found sand up her nose, snorted like the crack the man was on.

I come across them, tangled together like giant weeds blown in from some lost shore, and after I finish calling the cops, I wake him and I go, I says,“Now what you go and do that for?”

He say, “I ain’t got money. I ain’t got no food left.”

And I tells him, “I ain’t never been that desperate for food.”

He says, “The waves, they told me to do it. They showed me her face.” Well now, I ain’t superstitious, but I ain’t never looked at the sea the same way again.

And I tell him, “Son, now you go down to that water, and you dunk your head and hold it there, and you come up ‘n tell me what it feels like.”

And I says, I go, “That’s how this poor child’s mother gonna feel when she finds out what you done.”

Sometimes I walk down by the sea and wonder for a while how long it would take for me to drown down there. Not because I want to die.

Just wondering – wondering what it might feel like.