Sestina Poem

For Now

A    Sometimes I sit by the Ocean just to challenge the current.
B    I provoke the waves and they carry along their strong gusts of wind.
C    The sea writhes with anger and it stirs up the channel,
D    but I continue to fight from my stance on the coast,
E    with the endless determination of a shark's sense
F    like playing a character of my own movie in which I was cast.

F    I hide backstage in the frame of the shadow I cast,
A    and I will never see light again if I continue snapping the wires of an electrical current
E    that chills my bones and ignites my blood and hits me with the uncertainty of the loss of sense,
B    but I know I will always reawaken to the whistle of the slow wind,
D    and then I will rest upon my thoughts that will never lose the soft inertia it takes to coast,
C    and I will crawl to the change of an emotional channel


C    when I find myself in the passenger seat of my car, fiddling with the knobs of the radio,     awakening the voices of each channel,
F    and I listen intently, dodging the words of the spell they cast.
D    "There is a power whose care teaches thy way along that pathless coast,— "
A    Maybe this power will be visible when I am conscious and able to keep time with a ticking clock, holding myself to something more current.
B    But the car still drives itself, so I stick my head out of the open window so I can be carried away by the wind,
E    and I fight the punches thrown, defending my last thread of sense.


E    I fight for the small thread because that is all that holds me to my seat in the car that drives me home to the fragile arms of sense,
C    but it still breaks and I'm slipping back into a ferocious channel.
B    I try to grasp onto the reliability of the wind,
F    but when you're falling like I am, there's no time for safety nets to be cast,
A    so I listen to the air that drops me quick with each push of its current,
D    and I reminisce over the days when this was just an internal war on the coast.

D    My mind was clearer on the coast
E    A full moon could be seen as easily as my sense,
A    and now I'm drowning in the current,
C    of my own creation, and in the channel,
F    filled with my consciousness that I have cast.
B    But, when I pay attention, sometimes, I can catch a few pieces that throw themselves above the surface, like what I once did with the wind.


B    It's easier to catch the wind.
D    So for now, I will hold my head to the seat of my car that will continue its coast,
F    and I know my mind will not shatter if I stay in this cast,
E    and maybe, one day, I will see another full moon that looks like sense,
C    and maybe by then, I'll be swimming, not drowning, in the channel.
A    I just have to remember, that one day, I will win the war against the current.