"pirate regret"

"pirate regret"
with no energy by jake kilroy.

i did my best to clean out my mouth with soap and honest words,
but stuck forever in my gums were desolation and desperation.
they rotted my throat over the course of a sad chess game of years
with each speech i made spilling the humdrum sound of glory
that was wasted young, developed late, and then seen as a treasure
in the fitting rebirth of a scalawag miner turned blacksmith legend.

surely, in the prophecy of headstrong men and stubborn women,
there is room for the meandering sense of doom that catches us wild
when we massage rummy hearts and paint nostalgia as a big clock,
for if this is the wretched shipwreck we were hoping would sail,
then every carcass on deck, as none of us have done this before.

for when i was a young man,
says every long-winded old man,
i wore birds as necklaces
and claimed the teeth in my jaw to be jewelry,
all while i grinned a burnt church and stumbled into a lone tavern,
to let my wages rot in my rotten mouth with rotten folk to call rotten.

twas a fool's errand
to scour the earth,
trying to make a bed
that looked like a grave
after living long enough
to sleep forever.

smothered by orange and yellow at dawn,
i waited for nightfall to ask or beg or force
the gods of the horizon to let me see my insides,
without death, without whispers, without lies,
and use them as the body of the ship that i sail alone
to truer lands that would be as soft as a wink.
the wake will be pages and the sun will be growling,
and i can tip my captain's hat to the sinking world,
while i waste away in the squalor of eternity.
aye.