ocean nocturne

midnight, i am reading Booker T. Washington’s Up From Slavery
and the torchlight reminds me that this is what I have been doing
all my life. mean city. obscure street. sabbath nights. lonely savant.
i have always known there is something about me akin to oceans;
i think of my life and i remember that childhood neighbor
who drowned in the small mystery of the Mediterranean.
i did not know it would ever come to a time when my mother
would erect a space the shape of my father’s absence and invite me,
through an hour-long phone call, to sit in its dark emptiness.
she never ended those calls without the proverb about a paternal coat
that all sons would grow into. if i could, i would choose nakedness.
but freedom has limits for all African males. there are no visible chains.
we are all bodies fleshed into something. sometimes, that thing could
spread as wide as the ocean where things drown into. no wonder.
a boy i came to know once proclaimed his surrender to liquidity,
which is another way of saying that his body was found the next day
scattered in a room, waves foaming from his mouth. and who knows
how many sailors had lodged their ship of dreams there?
this is why parents pray to die before their children.
this is why destination is a motif of all prayers.
there is nothing to understand from the center of an ocean.
just confusion. just endlessness. just distant horizons and skylines.
my lack of faith will not make me deny the deep symbolism
of my mother smearing a pint of olive oil on my forehead before every departure.
at night like this, i join in her prayers to the forces of mortality,
to not swallow me when my compass leads me past its dwelling.
for i have been flowing, all my life. and inside this darkness,
inside this long narrative of the enslavement years of my dreams,
i have not yet awoken to the light that is the beginning of all ends.