Mindful

Your feet, licked by the Atlantic, are shell shocked.
Stung, salted, numbed in an instant
as your knees buckle and you linger
in the giddy, squirming wait.
It’s coming. The slow, certain onslaught of a wave.
The warm parts of you brace for the crash —
Clashed symbols! Flayed! Pepperminted! Freshed! Whooping!
You shriek out a stunned, violent symphony,
notes bouncing from the instrument of your pebble-dashed flesh.
Your head is a quaver, playing: E! E! E!
Staccato on the sea-foam staves.

A mindfulness class rises
to the surface of your mind, like a dead fish.
“Feel the flat-white in your mouth,” they said.
You wonder if the sea feels you in its mouth.
A bit of froth, breast-stroking on its tongue,
tasting the flat, monotone thing you have become.
White bread, disintegrating. Windowless. Fluorescent-lit.
Hunched over a blow-heater and a blue-hued screen.
A caffeine-punctuated collage: smile from a magazine,
worried-therapist-look, tag-lines cast into silences like fishing nets,
fishing for something reflective in the water.

But sometimes you dream of buildings
with doors that open and belong to you.
Trapdoors, corridors, carnival ghost-trains leading down
to hidden basements with wide, wet oceans like this.

Shivering back on the shore, you photograph the scene.
Seal it inside the four walls of your phone.
A doorway you can look inside and remember.
You’ll see it some day, framed by blinking notifications,
and wonder what you meant by it.


Ciara McCollam
 
If you have any thoughts on this poem, Ciara McCollam would be pleased to hear them.