Cassiopeia

I have a leak, my head has a leak, my mouth has let slip
so many words, tumbling out of me like water from stone,
like sand through my hand: over fingers, to fill the negatively-charged spaces between;

I have almost no words left. The precious few are recycled, over-used tarnished

garbage,
sea-spewn foam; mermaid-souls throttled and beaten over rock interminably.

Had I the words which fell,
fell out of me
to form pools of wet memories and warm lather for the birds which fly 'round my head
(my brow's feather-beaten, my eyesockets-- pecked clean,
diseased, laced with flies
and caked in rust
[encrusted Nightmare of Hot])----

Had I caught the words
(which poured, poured out of me)
in kitchen saucers, pans or papers
(oysters slickening silty syllables)----

I'd lay my claim to deeper waters,
or to servants indentured forever instead.
O Cassiopeia, beleaguered
for better by Poseidon's worst intentions----

How you hang, how you weep about as you call
your own-- O, Daughter-- back to you
from your captor's watery hovel:

The moon, she tries, but----
there you hang still.

(No ash black enough to antithesize;

from which these pinpoint-lights might rise.)