Yacht Rock

They sit, more often than not, wondering who’s to look after them. They lean over the bathroom  sink, used almost exclusively by them, and use q-tips and bobby pins to fish out curdled  clumps of black mold, hair, toothpaste residue. The ‘inner child’ in them, the one who ‘needs  reworked parenthood’ gags as they flush non-flushable material, they pity the sore sons of  bitches who’d let their disposals rot and fester maggot feed had they not fished in, all the while  wondering what in Gods name gave them the drive to go fishing in the first place, the drive to  capitalize a fictional name for the sake of maturity. A filled sink, naturally, and yet — a filled sink  beats an overflowing toilet, or moldy shower curtains, or a backlogged garbage disposal.  Extent, another layer. To what extent? ‘To what extent?’.  

This individual falls cushily on sewn memory; there was a sailing incident fifteen years past, the  boat turtles and gives in to the impending storm, she fills shallowly with enough water for  weight against captain, and she knocks into tall weeds and a sunken pier. Captain ducks  under, vainly searching for a caught line that doesn’t exist, and water rushes into their ears. Ten  inches below, the swells fall softly, rhythmically, pressing against the padded bank in familiar  tunes, creating an arch of space for the clinking to cut through. Buoy chains, trifold, clink  against themselves within forty yards. The thin mast of the Opti clanks against itself, and within  moments, the sunken pier. What surely must’ve been five to seven years of decay emitted an  echoing chamber equivalent to six-hundred years of deep-set limbo — it’s unalloyed  chlorpromazine, underage, denary punishment for an unexperienced discommode that vows to  linger overhead as a freckle-turned-discolored mole, evading proper evaluation entirely for the  sake of ‘Fuck you and us both, that’s Why.’ So they sit, more often than not, wondering who’s  to look after them. 

>>> Published in Seasons of Des pair Spring Quarterly Icons, 2022.

art;

Light Focus, Wols [Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze] 1950

6 1/4 x 5 1/2 in, gouache and pen and ink on wove paper

https://collection.barnesfoundation.org/objects/6556/Light-Focus/