Zoe Schwab - untitled

fasten your fedora to your head with a needle and thread
it'll hurt
but you'll be happy with how that makes things stay put.

you're bobbing like bait
freshly cast from a gray dock
made from the kind of weathered wood
that is best remembered through watercolor.
the cattails lean in like microphones to a crooner,
and one grazes your cheek,
brushes it ever so softly, so slightly
and you think of

the last time a person did it willingly
and without a prompting thought.

you'd root down to the nuts and
bolts of it all if the bottom of the water
were met with something solid,
something other than
leafy muck

but there there
there, there
there, there, there now!

you got a dapper diving suit
and there's just enough oxygen left to keep
you turn-that-frown-upside-down-ing
through the window of that mask
at the fish too ugly for the ocean.

Zoe Schwab

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/untitled-624/