Content warning: Suicidal ideation.

I travel back from the future to help the me of now get through this, but I have to do that thing where I can’t reveal who I actually am

You know stoned pockets won’t float.
And the horizon is too far away to hear your black dogged thoughts.
But here you are, time and again, staring, calculating, wondering where you can steal a small tin boat from.
Thalassa has given up washing away the indent of your feet, you visit so often.
This is a rut, a rot, a ritual you seemingly cannot stop.
All you want is Plato’s Gate, an aqua lung, the powers of a hydromancer.
Instead, the world gave you words.
How awful it is that you are human and thus can read and write poetry.
When people linger, longing in the liminal, others from elsewhere can reach them.
But it was you who ultimately decided on thalassotherapy.
Or rather, diving in without the intention of ever resurfacing.
Strip short of shorts, brisk the tsk tsk tsk of sand kissed wind.
Run toward the shore.
Don’t stop.
Lumber leg over wet dog, lapping.
And go, headfirst.
Beneath is the place where miracles sleep.
Sometimes, one wraps around a soul to make them come up different.
This is what’s so cool about baptism.
Iced blue green surf deluge.
You thrust, break surface, gasp.
The ocean is osmosis at a planetary level.
Membrane, do that thing where you inhale.
A tingle on the vein wall as magnesium rushes to quell burning.
The potassium soaks your skin’s coast and the blood harmonises.
The ocean is the memory of absorption, the gift of the dissolved, broken by the breaker, returned as swell.
Above, atoms pushes ions past your lips to make breath expand with bliss.
A communion occurs: after all, you too are fluid.
Let wet infect prayer.
Let oropharynx hum into being the healing.
Let the light reach even Aphrodite, cleft into two by men who always had to quantify love.
And us, we know how to pluck thread from lip of salt’s crest.
How many times have we sewn ourselves back together?
It’s what our kin do best: quiltbagging.
Between the mirror and the spear, we thrum.
We are holy as if saints, as if brothers, as if sisters, as if siblings.
As if the whole damn church, but one of our own making.
The turf can’t face our brilliance as we bind flesh to horizon and vow to rise, again and again.
And was this not all caused by us?
We waved to our first beau, the big blue.
It waved back.
And the world has been flowing ever since.
And between Monica’s children and the verse of a gen, a gem, a gender, a generation, there we are, awkward but alive.
My, how we shine.
And maybe we stare at the horizon because we’ve been told to go west and yes, that could be where we came from.
But we are here, now, and when the sun sets it will illuminate a path.
Across it, we’ll dance.
Or step.
And wouldn’t that be divine if we were the ones who could walk on water.
If you write it down, and say it is so, it will be so.

Until then, you come back here again and again, stare where Perth Canyon slumbers.
You hope one day the old gods with four arms and four legs will return

About the author

Scott-Patrick Mitchell is a queer non-binary poet in Western Australia, on Whadjuk Noongar Land. They are the author of Clean, a poetry collection that details their lived experience with addiction and recovery. Clean has been described as “a book you will never forget” by John Kinsella and a cross between Henry Lawson and William S. Burroughs by Mascara Literary Review.

SPM’s work appears in Contemporary Australian Poetry, The Fremantle Press Anthology of Western Australian Poetry, Solid Air, Stories of Perth and Going Postal. They have a number of previous chapbooks, including songs for the ordinary mass (PressPress, 2009), The Rutting Season (Mulla Mulla Press, 2012) and This Is How We Heal (Hectic Measures Press, 2018).

Photo by Benjamin DeYoung on Unsplash.