remember when i wrote poetry?

Swimming

Far far beneath in the abysmal sea,
The Kraken sleepeth.
-Alfred, Lord Tennyson

He sails me carefully:
I swim with a many-armed,
many-mouthed,
many-tongued kraken.

I feel his voice and he tells me—
Each tongue tastes things differently.
He tells me—These Pacific waves are no land of Aquinas.
The lines of this coast
are as varied as the edges of my faith.

(I want to ask him, someday,
how he found his way here from those Nordic depths,
how he came from that dark cold into
this unfrozen salt water)

You see, he teaches me to eat of one thing,
and taste of many: to find the things I look for
in the things I see.
And because I am one, I find myself in all:
it is this talent that lurks behind his tentacles and tongues.

The skin of freedom is filled with this ocean,
His ocean.
I breathe in, to give up,
to slide into this liberation.

The lights come early;
I did not expect to see so much,
I tell the kraken.
Fearsome, yet he is my only company.
What other voice have I to hear?

I remember these things
because I leave no wake and everyone else is dreaming.
I am both sailor and swimmer:
I am partnered with the tide.