My Boat Broke



Somewhere between an in and out wave,
my boat broke; it’s an essential
scaled down vessel of my body -
alarm bells began to toll
in the pith and plank of being.

Water being almost always in a fluid state
did the unexpected and played dead,
attaining a most unusual state
of neck down paralysis

and so, head moving left and right
yet frozen beneath,
(assuming there was a beneath),
I remained trapped upwards,
caught like a small fly in a glass of merlot.

The boat, though riddled with holes,
sinks only to the gunnels yet plows on,
gliding gracefully upon a moon-path
toward a moon that had hid its face under
a soggy pillow.

By now I could hear the bed creaking
under the strain of being nudged
by several icebergs.

‘I am not a fruit fly’, I shouted,
as a rising sun
raced to a corner of the bedroom
to watch my dreaming brain
struggle up to the level of its eyes

while I reluctantly bobbed
in the stale undercurrent
of that fourth unwise
glass of red wine.
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Submitted by JohnDiamond on February 16, 2021

Modified on March 05, 2023

54 sec read
1

Quick analysis:

Scheme XXAXB CXCX XDDXX XXXXX BXX XXXXE AXEX
Closest metre Iambic tetrameter
Characters 934
Words 180
Stanzas 7
Stanza Lengths 5, 4, 5, 5, 3, 5, 4

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