I've been watching IMAX documentaries about the ocean for a couple weeks. Apparently when I was making my queue on Netflix I thought I wanted to see a fair amount about the sea. Anyway, about how I should've been a sea thing, sometimes as I walk down the halls at work I imagine myself suddenly swimming, gliding down the halls instead. I want to swim so badly. It's still too cold. I love ocean creatures. They're so strange and colorful and symbiotic. I like how they move, so gracefully. Jellyfish are especially interesting; transparent, luminous, stingy, diminutive if not massive. And octopi! Incredible. They change their color and texture to match their surroundings instantly! Vicious little buggers, too. Sea snails are amazing as well. I would never have believed in them without the photographic proof. Every color, incredibly decorated, venomous, some have shells, others poisonous quills. They're all born male. Those who survive long enough mature into females, eventually. Very interesting! I love the diversity of this ecosystem. If I had been born a sea thing I think I should have been a leather back sea turtle. They are fantastic swimmers, well protected, and live to be very old. Seafood is my favorite. Time for a poem!
I should have been a sea thing
Living where all is now
Swimming in the cool forever
A little risk always tingling at my back
The wet worlds of such alien life
Layers of sunlight, shadow, hunters, victims
Feeling every swell, every ripple, every wave
Breathing in the secrets of a hidden world
Things alive for ages, evolving, changing
Linking a destiny with mine
All shimmer and glitter, scale and fin
Gill and tail
Things like brains grow in scarlet, bronze, deep purple
To float on time, in time and out of time
Beyond it, beneath it somehow
Tentacles curl around the things they want
And they take
A life always on the brink of an ending
Old things new, now is all there is
I should have been a sea thing
Perhaps the air knew better
