He liked it straight, no chaser please
In ’59, shit was bad but not like today
Bleached, broken and blanched reefs
Lagan jilted mermaids’ love for sale
Single use straws stabbed floating
Athwart in bleeding nostrils of turtles
Like fading trumpet diminuendos
Choked by islands of buoyant trash
A bitches brew of trilling jetsam
Strangulated, dappled, and bruised
Like the distended neck of Shiva
After drinking our ocean’s poison
Or the attenuated whispering sustain
Of a Mile’s trumpet phrased thisness
Accompanied to solos of dead species
Blown lipped and extinct in a silent way
If I were a bell I’d toll for gone gone gone oceans
That weep spilled oil from breached steel sterns
Like his blood gushing out in front of Bird Land
The Prince of Darkness in a mist of liquid rouge
Beaten by cops and the madness for being black
The moon dreams tragic ballads of yesteryears
lamenting the sound from Morpheus’s conch
When the lights are low even seas fade away
Bye bye blackbirds’ tummies of Coke caps
Oil covered pelicans snatch pill bottles
Amidst rancid floating piles of garbage
Bellies of whales stuffed full of plastic
Listen to the trammeled song of crabbers
Ladybirds cull through their murky wake
Their brass squawks mourn by the fantails
Blue in green haze turns sea sickened jade
Electric red tides swell then hip-skit
Like the way Bill Evan’s fingers moved
Six pack wrapped and bound rostrums
Parbuckled across green dolphin straits
Rotting on lazarets from trawlers’ drift nets
The devil may care for sharks caught
Tangled up, breathless and sapphirine
Split open and bleeding some kind of blue
For earthweal Shark Poetry weekly challenge
The Tigress Awakens 
Wow, well done! The image is striking and heartbreaking. Amazing that you have done the Appalachian trail. I hope you write about it for us.
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The trail has touched my life in so many ways. Almost all of my earlier poems were indirectly or directly about the AT or PCT
Here’s one I wrote on my other poetry blog https://everydayoneironaut.wordpress.com/2014/08/27/you-will-remember/
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That is some mad jazz. I hear Miles and Bill weaving sad deep blue in toxic green. I hope this startles the world awake as much as it shook me. Welcome to earthweal and hope to see you again soon. Weekly challenge launches Mondays, open link on Friday nights. (And if you click on the Mr. Linky icon you’ll go to a place where you can enter your link. Put your city of origin in next to your name so we know where in the world you’re hailing from. (The hope here is that we get voices from around the world.) – Brendan
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Thanks! I am looking forward to exploring your site. Cheers and thanks for the wonderful comment!!!
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Kapow! This poem hits hard at the gruesome reality of the plastic nightmare we have unleashed. Your images are so striking, this poem is a rallying cry to planet protectors. Thank you so much for linking it for my prompt. I especially admire the ending, with the sharks bleeding some kind of blue.
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Aw snap, thank so much for the beautiful comment!! your piece on sharks is heartbreaking…makes me angry…thinking I might write another poem specifically for sharks this week….thanks you so much for sharing the horrific information being done to these amazing creatures!
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Vivid and different! I love the use of sound in ‘If I were a bell I’d toll for gone gone gone oceans’, the alliterative list of three, ‘Bleached, broken and blanched reefs’, and the strains of jazz in this poem. But oh, the horrific picture you paint of ‘islands of buoyant trash’ and the ‘solos of dead species / Blown lipped and extinct in a silent way’. These lines brought tears to my eyes:
‘Oil covered pelicans snatch pill bottles
Amidst rancid floating piles of garbage
Bellies of whales stuffed full of plastic
Listen to the trammeled song of crabbers’
and
‘The devil may care for sharks caught
Tangled up, breathless and sapphirine
Split open and bleeding some kind of blue’.
Welcome to earthweal!
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Ahh big hugs!!!!! Thanks for all the kind words…I am looking forward to writing my poems for earthweal…seems like my kind of place!!!!
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Wow, you really drove this home! Your poem is full of righteous anger for the destruction we’ve wrought upon our oceans. Your message comes through loud and clear.
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Ahhh ty so much for the kind words!!! Putting my anger into words is much better than the alternative…
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Perhaps both are needed!
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I really like the way you mingled the music with the ocean–our behavior towards each other is just as careless as the way we treat the waters of earth and its creatures, the way we so easily use and abuse everything we touch. Beautiful. (K)
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This is a powerful protest song against mindless destruction and for the rights of the other inhabitants of this planet. Such a lot of good lines in there.
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a litany of humanity’s most lamentable craven acts, to the soundtrack of our people’s most magnificent art ~
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Enjoyed your creative edgy poetry. You have captured all the waste thrown into the sea. In some states plastic straws have been banned. I bought someone who lives in one of those states a reusable stainless steel straw that came with cleaning utensils.
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Every little bit helps!!! Thanks for your wonderful comment!
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Your poetic rage is well versed here – this plastic hell we have created and the poor creatures must live in it… Descriptive line built upon descriptive line… A fine balancing act!
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