Three Horizons Away

Three horizons away,

the sea is no longer blue.

The cement sky dumps granite mountains of rain

into waves that would pulverize the Ark,

would make flying rice of the Manhattan skyline.

It rises and falls like Norse Gods

shaking out their bedsheets

Out there, it is always thirty kinds of cold,

the cold of a thousand arrows,

cold that shoots through flesh

like an x-ray through a child's lie

and cannot be described by those who haven't

felt the floor collapse from beneath their very souls.

They say, with no man 'round to hear them,

trees may never fall,

but, the ocean needs no man around

for it to conquer all.