Snarling, spiteful twisted spasm,
Boiling in demented tantrum
Battering the blurred divide
Of storm and sea and blasted sky
The squall’s jaws foaming rabid
Snaps at mast with whirling eye

Endures the ashen lonely Sailor,
With raw palms spread to calm the
Manic dancing Captain’s table
As gossiping shrill splitting timbers
Spit his fears to the raining tears
Of quivering glass chandeliers

And vessel thrashes lashing free of reason
Flanks of oak beyond their season crash
Against the luggish chains of gravity
His eye turns to the grey, still, deep eternity
And the pale, heartless, vacant forms
Whose number wait his count that night
With the tireless, nodding, drifting pause
Of those who know their right

Then low, abandoned mother’s groaning
Mournful under weight of wanting
Last sad cry of English cedar
Marauding hordes of slashing rapids
Charge the decks and hollow gangways
Smashing doors and ripping ledgers
Salted spittle flying in the face of tipping wells

The once proud Bristol girl surrenders
Back snapped, mast still stormward
Renders forever the manic defiler whose
Frozen frenzied fingers grasp that once loved body
Cold now, save the slowly fading drumming,
Her last lover stops his fighting
And dreams of dusty boyhood haylofts,
Which once were clipper decks.