The Diver

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I have a degree in Marine Biology. I wanted to be Pudsey's answer to Jacques Cousteau. It never happened. I don't even dive. My brother Ray does. He lives in Galway, Ireland. Ironic.

I still love the sea though. The sea and all it contains. I wrote a sea-themed poem a couple of years back; The Diver. It's a love story of sorts.
The poem was originally posted on the Fex Wazner Art Forum, on a thread dedicated to a friend of Lulu, one of the posters on there. The friend was called Alasdair and he died at sea. See the original thread here.

It's worth exploring the many categories on the forum too, while you're there. Some nice people use it, and there are some interesting subjects being discussed. At the time, the poem was only seen by a handful of posters.

There may be a different handful of people reading this, so for your benefit, here it is again. Feel free to comment, even if it's just to say "What a pile of shit."

The Diver

I slide beneath the slapping waves
to gloomed embrace of sea.
My futile fight for life is lost
and drowned, my tearful plea.

Cold penetration’s soon forgot
as bursting lungs are filled
with airless, cold and briny flow.
My hopeless struggle’s stilled.

The gentle rape is soon complete,
my fading vision clouds,
as death’s eternal blackness
my mind forever shrouds.

The ocean’s bed for me is made
and in it I must lie,
in cushioned mud and sighing sand
beneath a foam splashed sky.

The groans of the abyss do touch
my sea-invaded ears
but senseless, lifeless, dead are they
and nevermore will hear.

The taste of tears may reach grey lips,
if from the shore they drift.
From where my lover cries and weeps
her love and life bereft.

She helpless watched her true love drown,
sucked into fearful deep,
and what the sea decides to take,
the sea is wont to keep.

I drifted down on shafts of sun,
my body at rest lies,
its soft arrival keenly watched
by swivelled, stalked eyes.

The marching crabs in haste do come,
all crust and clicking claws,
to feast upon my sodden flesh
with sliding, slicing jaws.

A deadpan goat-eyed octopus
sits watching from a crack,
the seething, jointed, feeding hordes
amidst the olive wrack.

My death so pointless seemed to be
an awful, tragic waste
but brings a feast to crawling things
which gorge in greedy haste.

They pick and pull and probe and chew
this fleshy human bait,
like automata skittering
as eight-armed death awaits.

It oozes forth to make its kill
a mass of living rope,
a slime and gristle nightmare
its prey without a hope.

My bloated, ragged, rotting corpse,
all breath and beauty gone,
is feeding ocean scavengers
with meat and blood and bone.

Decaying in this gurgling grave,
this burial at sea,
the drifting sands in cold green murk
will hide me by degree.

Fish with mirrored curves gleam past
through strands of writhing weed,
while a myriad twinkling starfish
glide by on silent feet.

Cold shadow, slime and loneliness
now haunt my empty eyes.
Pelagic winds round bony limbs
in quiet swirlings sigh.

I drift upon the current’s flow,
or lie beneath the sand,
an echo of a memory
of air and love and land.