I Am So Not Going to Title This That

Diving for pearls is slang?

The sea dons a mask — its undulating reflections of clouds spreading into sky like butter into toast, reminding me of peeks into great-grandmother’s mirror, its funhouse distortions.

What’s missing? A re-silvering of the quaking image confronting me. A dive to unmask the courage at my depths. A swim in a schizophrenic ocean, where poetry speaks prose

and prose, poetry. What if

I drown? John, bring me a revolver and guide me. It is not dying, it is not dying. It is shining, it is shining, relaxing and floating downstream…

Diving for Pearls — what better title

to depict submersion in a new world, where words sculpt themselves from sand into ethereal castles, moats as modes, windows rimmed in abalone, except

who knew

those three words make a poem? Slang imagery for washing dishes — bobbing amidst bubbles, emerging from the froth like Venus with pearls, symbolic moons perfectly cleansed for Universal expansion. Epiphanies within a sea-shell of soapy water.

Yet, then some smart ass had to go and make my title sexual. And while I am no prude and certainly have no problem with cunnilingus, I cannot cannot cannot cannot go there

although, I must confess, it will feel awfully good to reach this poem’s climax.

©Jenine Bsharah Baines 2021

“Pearls don’t lie on the seashore, if you want one, you must dive for it.” Chinese Proverb

What was missing? Courage.

A quick google search taught me I was also missing knowledge of the two slang meanings of my proposed title, Diving for Pearls. One, dishwashing, was literally…

Related posts:

To be here now. Too fast this Sunrise gone a pink so deep so dark so hot lava pink lemonade sky back to the blue hue. If it were red every morning it’s like those old, that old saying about the…

A learned Divine of our time, reports a history almost like that of Ibycus, for he said that a German being on a voyage, fell into the hands of certain thieves, who were ready to cut his throat, the…

There is a face in my room, Papa” declared my five-year-old daughter, one morning. “Face?,” I remarked. “Where under the roof is it? I have never seen any face in your room, except yours, of course…