Sometimes, when two waves meet in the ocean,
They embrace, each smoothing the movement
Of the other, and are calm.

Stepping on the shore, every grain of sand
Is a fossil of a word spoken long ago
And far down in the depths of the ocean.

Their tones are too deep for my ears,
But I can hear them with the soles of my feet.
The sand sends currents up my legs,
Guiding tides through my spine,
Generating waves in my chest cavity,
Whose salt spray is picked up by breezy thoughts
And gusty cares.

Sometimes, I can even find sand in the clouds,
Though they are never anything other
Than a low, indistinct bass
Among all the noise of the inner atmosphere.

When they were spoken,
The force of these words
Chafed the stone lips on the stone faces
That make up the ocean floor.

Chanting like monks,
They mutter stony sutras
That swirl deep waters.
They keep chanting until,
In grinding themselves together
To form inevitable consonants,
Their lips erode into sand.

They will speak themselves into oblivion.

Sometimes, the sand compacts itself
Into a new face and the cycle continues.
Other times, the sand drifts out
On the tides it created
To settle on distant shores.

Oftentimes, these waves will clash
And crawl over each other
Until they churn themselves into a monsoon.
Or, one will grow so big that it dwarfs the others
And tramples them all into insignificance.

But, sometimes, as in me,
Two waves will meet in the ocean,
Embrace, and be calm.

I am a recent graduate from New Jersey who graduated with a B.A. in Creative Writing with a History minor from Farleigh Dickinson University. I am an emerging writer currently working on my first novel and with an unpublished book of poetry based on Ovid’s Metamorphoses. I write both poetry and prose, and tend to lean towards the mythic, the fantastic, and the bizarre in my writing.