Tube

So elusive
you’ve become Heroin for some,
These days it’s become easy to avoid
my average bones and strung muscles,
me bobbing, taking water
like a holed bath toy,
above this vast pitch of dusted green.

Swells graze acned reefs of red-bait,
or mow head-on into sandbanks,
infused with littoral energy,
born in a pile-up of isobars
in the Roaring Forties.

Soaring through mercury,
fused to fibreglass by wax
crouched as fingertips taste speed,
All is quiet as a lake for Icarus at sea,
and then the ocean folds into a blur of spray,
and she holds you like a lover,
inside a mosaic of ecstasy,
breathless,
as the world dims to an almond.

Come June
and cold fronts that look like coils of razor wire,
Conrad would have paddled out too,
forsaking Lord Jim and Nostromo
for these few fractions in the tube.