Was the harpooning justified?

The belly of a whale

Distended and lost in

The relentless waves rolling on the surface of the boat

The ambergris will never be recovered

The subtle diabetic gourmet truffle spoon

And the lantern oil

All of it just disemboweled into the ocean

To be consumed by the chemical breakdown

Of saline calcification

Or consumed by the sentinel creatures

That follow the harpooning vessel

As far as the length of their aquatic forms will take them

The whale had been assassinated

But this was nothing more than thick besotted flesh

Dragging over the canopies of sales

Nothing that remained of any value

From the chronic misguidance of deeds

Of the whaler’s fingertips

Circulating slowly across the crusted remains

There would be no need for the cabin boy

To descend into the skull of the whale

To retrieve the remnants of vital organs

Every harpooning was unjustified

He knew as he sat idly by

And reminiscing for nothing other than the sheltered shoreline

Where he would angle up his feet above the water

Clumsily in the toothpick awareness

Writing the despotic angel words

On parchment paper

Just mindless dribbling

Awaiting the sunrise of admonition within

That would cause a caustic uprising

A cetacean inspiration

There had been nothing but lost wandering

Ever since the remnants of his father

Had been shoved into the earth

There were scattered relations

That would assign to him meaningless tasks

Trough feeding

Shovel expurgating

Lessening the assent of weariness into the blindness

Of stoic banal de-inspiration

There was nothing that had elevated him above

An unenhanced lifetime of pressing

Each trigger finger glow worm

That he had pulled from the soil

Into the bedroom light of inhibitions

The stable had been calling to him

When there was nothing more than a beckoning to the slough

At first there was a deinvestigation

A surrender to the likelihood

Of encaptured slavehood to the wheels and ploughs

Of upstate New York

Until he had decided

Without any real anticipation of anything more

Than a simple release from earthen fermentation

To set his eyes towards the sea

The whaler’s den beneath the slow arc arising

Of Halley’s Comet

As it circled the sky

Richard Henry Dana

And the Knickerbocker report of Mocha Dick

He would leave his tenement hovel

And make his way towards

The momentary slavehood of an uninitiated

Troglodyte platform angler

Into the wasteland of cetacean grapplers

When he would assist in the dying

They would all die slowly, one by one

As the ship reached the crest of waves

And dove into the unrighteousnesses of harpoon warfare

Unaware of how his soul would resist

Unpalpable preterition in the steady

De-accumulation of gray and sperm whales

He allowed the eagerness of the moment

To push him towards the plough of the sea

Shipwrecked and disproportionated by the weight

Of the pornographic ocean

He would stumble into the hallucinating graveyard

Of cannibal hosts

Who would tether him to the fire

And unleash the genesis of parliamentary words

That would subtly dissect and enamor

Encapsulate and derogate

Plummet into and

Catalogue by categorization

All the internal and external deeds of mankind

With verbal harpoons he would assassinate

The despotic internal assignations of the egoic mind

To lay out the remnants of a precipice

Where they could each be labeled and incarcerated

Beginning to unwind

The psychological web of

Mankind’s dissociation from himself