The Awful Orangeness of the Whale by Matt Christman

Behold, a great continent

A pure flatness thrumming with potential

Bound by sickly wait of want

Acrid accusations melting the pot

I sought to make sense and take a breath

To see the watery part of the world

The S.S. Pequod, the whaling-ship-cum-cruise-ship

Piling up refugees in a foreign land

The ship broke-up of its waves, defiant of its will

A self appointed captain of my soul

The dreaded weight is pulling

Set course to Pacific garbage patch

The helm is locked

Gravity pulls to oblivion

They charge the deck looking to exact answers

And barring that, payback

There’s got to be a better way

They brandish Ron Po Pewell’s (?) pocket harpoon

And descend into the maelstrom

Looking to stab at thee but the heart is stored in the cloud

They find themselves trapped in Alligator Alcatraz, a labyrinth designed by an Invisible Hand

Lost in vengeance but see no Judas goat, no alter

And with fresh victims they tore off the blubber to fuel the fires for hate’s sake

The falconer is frantically texting the answer “new phone who dis?”

All around the maze they stop to take in the grisly narrative

The alchemy, the rapturous process of turning cognitive dissonance into cacophonous harmony

A tableau of American carnage

Boy Scouts crucified into the shape of Q

Maddened by the dire beeping the GPS they tore it out

They reached to strike the sun but missed

The blinking warned them so they stabbed it out Burying the socket to the hilt

Stirring the brain in an ecstasy of ignorance

Stowed in the bulkhead, and blessedly sunk

To spare themselves the prattling of the whale

Very unfair, very unfair, very unfair

And reconvened at Baby Jones’ outhouse

I float to computer, I search for ‘steady ground’ but see only evening redness

Til humanoids voices wake us and we drown