I am the one who rides
out of the four, champion
of blue swells. Cups and swords,
wands and coins: None
of them can win
the castle my red-haired lady
grails at the bottom of the mere,
she with the blue eyes and
loud nipples who waits eternally
for this pure salt soul
to cross her moat of tides.

Knight of waves I am,
brute galloper of seas,
saddled to a steed of
blackest blue with
crashing foam for mad hooves.

The night wind is wild
in my hair as I ride out
again, the moonlit equestrian
abroad a wet precipice
wracked with the skull
of every man to seek her joys
in the drowning beds of salt.

O the storms I have ridden,
shrieking billows of smashed foam,
towers of black-walled doom,
berserking every tanker and junk!
Through them all I have jousted,
unseating every rogue wave’s challenge.

Except for my lady’s blue garter
round my bicep I ride naked,
my long black hair like a mane
in the sea-breeze, my tattooes
livid-black in moonlight --
spirals and whorls, dragons and
whales, a brute cock with horse balls
rising up my back.

Read them and you get
my scripture, Oghams of
Lascaux dreamed by a fish
and carved in my flesh
by a stone man on a blue shore
with a green fin dripping
shark’s blood and jellyfish,
ochres of squid ink.

Three nights she came to me
wrapped in the shawl of salt sleep,
her red hair burning in gold
moonlight, her eyes infernal-
wild, her voice singing over me
the feral bonelust of the sea

coiffed in the red-haired organums
of love that coil like silk around
her cunt, that cave between
her knees which daunts to a
womb of such blue welcome
no man has ever come close
to it and not become deranged,
her salt voice a parch no sea may quench.

Three times she wound me in
the sweet combs of her charm,
waking me on the world’s emptiest shore
bested and haunted and goaded
to ride every ninth wave that swells
and crashes full down the sound
of her bittersweet voice,
crooning and laughing, calling
and bidding me adieu.

Forever I gallop in full moonlight
on the silverblack backs of wet night,
in quest of rounding at last her main
at the wet end of all desire:
I’ll never quite find her
though each ride somehow
keeps me saddled to the thirst,
as if each wet song of her could kiss
the parting hills of bliss.