Brilliantine Mortality
The first dip to the surface of water penetrates your skin like a thousand needles.
The first lap is always the harshest, must not forget to keep moving, increase your repetitions - not single, not double, but triple strikes, every third strike you are allowed to come out of the water.
There are so many times I was about to hit the wall of the pool I want to give up and leave and never return. The perpetuity of wasted strength, relapses, re-lap-ses.
But then I allowed myself to pause, there I was, respiring deeply. Midday at Lido, the sun shined through the hazy sky, I faked the warmth from the ray, people say, we all have to travel through a greater sense of imagination. There I was, pretending, making myself believe that the world is warm beneath the bitterest cold and indifference.
Feet was cold and wet, so does my bag, the flow took me from Hackney to Olafur Eliasson’s icebergs at the river bank. At least I could melt my salty tears on the river Thames and wrapped in water when I take my final breath. There was grief, heartbreak, hopelessness and closure.
Tree branches carefully placed by the pool, casted shadows became some form of time-specific sculptures.
“I felt the lapping of an ebbing tide
Always, always, always the sea
Brilliantine mortality”
Then this song softly treaded into my heart:
Carry on inside of your heart
Under the brine you won't notice the dark
Can stone and steel and horses heels ever explain the way you feel
From Scapa Flow to Rotherhithe, I felt the lapping of an ebbing tide
Oh the heavy water how it enfolds
The salt, the spray, the gorgeous undertow
Always, always, always the sea
Brilliantine mortality
So irrigate your heart until you know you're complete
And you're draped in kelp, below by 8,000 feet
My soul she cried I thought you'd died amid fumes of formaldehyde
You have been gone for so long I felt the lapping of an ebbing tide
Oh the heavy water how it enfolds
The salt, the spray, the gorgeous undertow
Always, always, always the sea
Brilliantine mortality
When this Corpus Christic isle became a land of ocean blue
Again, she cried, you turned my eye
At mentions of, no matter why
And in the end, an August sun
And one by one we blew
Until the devil screamed in the evermore
In envy of the grace we saw
Oh the heavy water how it enfolds
The salt, the spray, the gorgeous undertow
Always, always, always the sea
Brilliantine mortality
