David Ayer

BEING THE SQUID

Your body being a mental body is incapable
of dying...you need not be afraid. The Lords of 
Death are one's own hallucinations. Voidness
cannot injure voidness. Act so as to recognize this.
    --The Tibetan Book of the Dead

The midnight ferry back from Sado-ga-shima-- 
on the sea we saw a trolling blue sun,
its panel lights, like the lure of Las Vegas,
scarring blue the outline of the hills around Ryotsu.
Squid like the light, Fumiko explained.
 
No squid could instill such discipline
as to reign in its offspring's urge--
light remains a moment in the retina, and the squid want
what we all want, to be swimming distance
from the rays of redemption.
 
We're drawn by a glimmer of revelry,
by a midnight ramble on the old fairgrounds --
then in a flash, dashed to oblivion
by a plot which we ourselves hatched.
 
Passing through this transparency of tragedy,
thereafter incapable of dying, fearless:
being the squid so someone else doesn't have to.

Date of Birth: February 22, 1964 Location: Toronto, Ontario, Canada Occupation: ESL instructor Email: davidayer@hotmail.com Publications: Zymergy, The Fiddlehead and The Windhorse Review, and is upcoming in Jones Av. and an as-yet untitled anthology by children of hippies

- September 2003 - Being the Squid The Middle Years A Recommendation for Dismissal of the Operative Leaving Pound's Grave Frigid carved in formica The Importance of Being Ernest Landscaping To My Lost Child Black Linen Eclipse in Threes Probanza