It looks like silence to you. Some absence of mind, some poverty
of intellectualism.

If I was a water creature, I would be a platypus mermaid.
In childhood I decided: the platypus is a superior animal, confounding
in their unbelonging, comfortable in their liminality.

You may not understand the appeal of the platypus mermaid. That is okay.
I do not understand the appeal of speaking on land, where dusty words disintegrate,
when you could speak underwater,
in many quiet bubbles.

Sometimes, when I speak, I find myself submerged: navigating currents with open lips.
You are left behind, but only because you would not breathe; drowning humans
is for sirens, not the business of platypus mermaids.

You stare, fish-eyed, human lung’d, as I try to spit words out
through rivers and lakes and seaweed and sediment, grasping at wet sand,
choking it down to form the half-baked land language you prefer.

Sometimes, when I speak, you ask too much;
so comfortable on earth, you do not seek the water, the depths; gravity unsure.

If you did, though. If you did, I would comfort you, kiss your lips to help you breathe,
rub your back as you choked up thoughts, fish-eyed, mer-lung’d, in big, shining, bubbles
that float to a sun-dappled surface.