Vanquished by the Song
Go yearning across stranger tides,
and dead men’s empty, vacuous chests,
and let me know what you find.
Would it actually necessarily be death?
I don’t know how to explain what’s inside
doesn’t have to be the end.
What’s inside is a map of the world,
a cartographer, born, believed and bred.
You too, I think, met Borges and Baxter and Boseman
in your own way. I know very well that you
study Kristang secretly;
that what goes noticed is not heresy
but a growing awareness that you are not some easy Moluccan delicacy
picked off rocks for islands by buccaneers, and raiders, and preordained attempts to enculture entropy.
You know it,
And I live it.
The dawning of marauding
became something unrequisitioned endlessly:
going out on a limb
and walking the plank,
became unfortunately, ensnared in the worst possible flag
-bearer’s masthead.
The Maliduensa, abuse, and what has remained, for 77,033 years, instead:
I hoist the sails,
and still, ever more, go straightforwardly to drown:
I, as always has been foretold, still continue to refuse to beg.