My Pirate Novel by Ben Doyle

	My Pirate Novel          I have so much to yell to you,      mostly the way the skull sun hits each soft spot          of the sea so faithfully so      solid it makes death one tense past; tomorrow          this broth one is steeping in each      pore stained with seasonings until the white day          dilates beyond something you could      fit in your skull, sun, which is your novel now.          Yes and I have to yell to you      about your characters, each an orphan, one          wants something you refuse to say,      sobbing in his skull ten men up the mast, sobs:
Land! You     were a dream           we could have      when it was firm enough to sleep      long enough          to dream long      enough to sleep beyond these bodies.      But it        is a kind of      blindness now for the very       constancy of these          random waves;      the one look on every          finished face,      polished with spray;       wettest wood; the tangle of tawny     weed spent     from the brown sail:    same, the same. Here is the dark       Willy pictured       in blind Skull’s       gone eye, dark that may       be a burning          bright for all      the cur knows—
	Then I need to yell into you      to hold fire, be subtler now!––keep, if you can,               that dog’s patches over the gash,    the arr-barks, the tri-pegs, the chewing always               bloody bullion beneath the floe, back: forever until   necessary.          Instead: salt scurfed on the chain-whales;    purple shark-bite detail, sodom tradition               —each tense past. Hesitate to call    these flashbacks, my novel, just imaginings:               colonizing an island with    your cannon, coining holiday, specie, but ever               finding no island... . My Pirate    Novel each of your actions takes place, each in your nest,               nearer to the skull sun, every    sashed, amputated man climbs to spy and cry.                 Limbs pile like logs around a stake.    Each action alone, shone through a wet glass, not               one solid step or enemy.      What, are you called Downtime?     Something? Novel, what               are you, some kind of tragedy?      But tragedy is unnecessary, everyone has a               skeleton to pour rum through, hooks for hands, biting money.