The Dead Sea

Crashing waves smell of brine and lost legends,
mermaid tails and selkie skins, fevered voyages, pirate’s booty–bearded men and women with gold teeth and jewels on their mind, harrowing adventures, navigators with sunburnt skin, drunk on the wine of the ancient souls that watch from below–trip as they follow–eyes narrowing on the X–bones rise from the surface, floating like debree, a haunting laugh floats to their ears, taunting and beguiling–

Algae clinging to my skin, like grasping, ghostly fingers, stingrays glide through the tide, casting shadows and awe, jellyfish dance to the ancient songs of the Dead Sea,
And I cannot help but but stare as I sink–
Each breath a struggle as my eyes become laden, heavy with my past resolves–
The water dragging me down, my clothes burdened, my lungs filling up and up and up…

She watches the body descend like a falling star, the hair like a waving white flag in the pocket of light, catches her eyes. A mass of decomposing flesh, silver fish feverishly gnawing at soft, white flesh, and the others with cold eyes and dark fins, wait their turn, to touch such pink, red meat. She watches the melee from her tower of coral with relief.