Embodiment

Was this the face that launched a thousand ships?

It doesn't matter if he is 16 or 18. For me, he is timeless brother. His black gaunt face is filled with a smile beyond the capture of words, thoughts, or expression. This smile is a crescent Cheshire moon flipped beyond stereotype and reason. In my one surreptitious and voyeuristic thinly sliced look at this lunar beam I learned more about piracy than I had ever hoped to know.

His name, a pirate mantra to be sure, is Abduhl Wali-i-Musi. He is the lone survivor of the pirate crew that hijacked the Maersk Alabama. His mother begs for him, citing youth and innocence, like any good enough mother. She is at his fete. He is nailed, hanging in the balance. And I find myself given a role, too. I am the best beloved friend, too naive to run away, too stunned to move my face from his imagined breast.

We are at table. All the mateys' blood is upon the seas as inclusive feast for all creatures. Somewhere someone has fallen out of a papyrus basket. Some pharoah's daughter is late for her bath. I hear a screamed curse flailing through airs above pyramids, slave erections. The story is so old that we do not remember the moral. Fear not: The sacred is becoming and becoming syncretic anachronism.

It has been more than a hundred years since a pirate has been on trial in the United States. I wonder if there is anyone still alive who knows about the laws that sanction piracy. Or the attitude of the divine about laws and sins and first stones.

Remember I am not the mother. I make no plea for innocence. I see no innocent blood, no innocent shedders of blood, no innocent shedding of blood. It is all mixed in the salt of the sea. It is all waiting for the popular green recycle now manifesting in the red. New beginnings for debtors. New interest rates, higher and mightier. New pretense of solidarity. New recondite gnosis for the bedless grind.

What was it like 100 years ago? Were there dinosaurs in Florida eating ghost orchids? Were people dying before they had time to be adulterous? Were children shadows of parents, falling into place to replace dying genetically similar bodies? Did anyone know Somalia? Does anyone know now?

But the more things change the more we hear Christopher Marlowe note: "All places are alike, and every earth is fit for burial."

But we speak not of the earth. We are on the high seas, a place of universal jurisdiction. Any country that captures a pirate can try him.

Please let me try. I beg with Solomon's song: If you find my beloved, tell him I am lovesick. He is dark, but comely. In the secret place let me hear his sweet voice and see his lovely form.

In the name of the reform: (This is the form. This is the format. This is the paradigm. This is the schema.)

For he takes us into seas beyond the simplicity of our seeing. He captures us in our capturing of him. He lifts the veil and wipes clean the waxen tablet. He reinvents a losing purpose for cuneiform script created in its first form for the concretizing of debit and credit in the trades of ancient seas. He smiles it all into oblivion. And he knows not what he does.

"Who has ever loved that loved not at first sight (Christopher Marlow)?"

— Rx is the FloridaW eekly muse who hopes t o inspire profound mutiny in all those w ho care to read. Our Rx may be wearing a pirate cloak of in visibility, bu t emanating fr om within this shadow is hope that r eaders will f eel free to respond. Who kno ws: You may even inspire the muse. Mak e con tact if you dare.