Hull Bound

Sometimes I feel like Boot-Strap Bill,

...

lashed to the hull of my own hesitation,

barnacled by the years I did not move.

...

I have stood so long in the same dark water

that the salt has learned my name.

It threads itself through my ribs,

fills the soft hollows of my voice.

I taste brine when I try to speak.

...

There was a time I had legs—

desire like wind,

a compass that trembled toward something.

Now I am timber and tendon fused,

a relic hammered into place

by my own refusal to leap.

...

Stillness is not harmless.

It is a patient tide.

...

First it kisses your ankles,

calls itself rest,

calls itself survival.

Then it climbs—

hip, spine, throat—

until you are less a body

and more an artifact

weathered into obedience.

...

I feel the grain of the ship

growing through my skin.

Planks press into my back

like commandments:

Stay.

Endure.

Do not rock the deck.

...

Sea-creatures nest in the quiet places—

doubt, fear, the comfort of routine.

They pearl themselves into my joints.

I bend, but only with the current.

...

I watch others sail.

Their lanterns burn gold against the black.

I tell myself I am safer here,

fastened,

expected,

unchallenged by horizon.

...

But safety can rot a man.

...

I have mistaken paralysis for loyalty,

confused endurance with purpose.

I have let the ocean decide my shape

for so long

that my own edges blur.

...

And sometimes—

in the groan of the wood at midnight—

I feel my name slipping loose,

falling through the cracks in the deck,

swallowed by the deep.

...

This is the danger:

not drowning,

not storms—

but the slow surrender

to becoming scenery

in a life that was meant to be sailed.

...

If I do not tear myself free,

if I do not splinter the boards

and bleed salt and splinters and terror—

...

I will wake one day

with coral in my lungs,

eyes glazed like sea glass,

no longer a man

but a warning.

...

For even the ocean

does not need to kill you

to claim you.

...

It only asks

that you stay still.