Proto-

- Poetry - 

I drag my toes in the sand
   demarcating who I was,
   dancing around who I am.
   Pouring water from my chest
      into knuckle-deep moats,
      swirling sand and liquid,
      I facilitate the building of a sandy self –
      a self prone to destruction
            by hands
                 feet
                 seas
                 and storms;
                 a self prone to constant recreation.
 
I do not decry the building of my life
   on the ever-undulating,
              ever-morphing unsteady beach.
I do not mourn the constant undoing
                                             rebuilding
                                             the constant change
                                                   intrinsic in the definition of the sea.
I rest in tidal pools,
   generating geometric shelled goo
   and spindled, spangled, tendrilled truths.
   Fermenting, I grow as feathered verdigris
                                  as I photosynthesize
                                        theorize
                                        actualize
                                        evolve into a proto-being
                                                   pulling myself
                                                   with foreign fins
                                                   onto the heretofore beingless beach.             
Nurturing the self with salt
                                     heat
                                     breeze
                                     and freeze,
I hold to my fins
   as I grow legs,
   as I move from sea to land
                   and land to sea.
There is a great treachery before me,
   but what is there to fear
   when I come from beyond?
                        from below?
                        from the sea?
 
I am alien
   and familiar.
I am the whole
   and but a sliver.
I am warm waters
   and the cold current shiver.
I rub salt in my wounds
   and grow limbs.
I walk on your shifting ground
   defying parables in order to thrive
                                           to live.
 
The rock is shaped by an oceanic barrage,
   and I am the creator
                  the shaper
                  the oscillator
                        between a rock and a liquid place.
I grow with sunlight and moon,
   and undo with the room
                           the space
                           the veracity of tsunamic ruin.
 
Swelling
   breaking
      curving
         swirling
            I am whirling and hurling
               into the depths of darkness
                                       of succumbing
                                       of perpetual death and
                                                   becoming.
            I house volcanic heat and
               chilling arctic defeat and
                  tropical birthing retreat and
                     it is unfathomable what I can upheave.
 
I build my house on the shifting sand,
   and cackle with regeneration
   as man – believes –
              in a conquerable land.