My heart is an ocean, one once teeming with life;
With clownfish and bluefin,
With spinner dolphins and striped,
With humpbacks and belugas,
My heart is an ocean that once bubbled with life from all corners of the world.
During its days as a young ocean, a mere shining sea,
It was stormy.
With splintering lightning, raging waves, violent winds,
the animals would scatter.
Pelting raining tears,
Deadly riptides of dread,
The crack, crack, cracking of stoney rage;
They would disrupt my sea,
For moments,
Blips.
And although a downpour of sorrow was common,
There was the occasional sunshine of joy,
Parting the clouds and gently brushing the backs of rising mammals.
Rainbows of excitement would arch around the surface,
And life would bloom like the new stocks of seaweed upon the decorated seafloor.
But I was used to sudden rain showers,
Clouding the sun
Or,
Once in a blue moon,
Accompanying it,
With the great waves cresting and falling in tune.
Tides toil,
And winds spin with my grief,
Grief over a loss I couldn’t comprehend.
I didn’t want it,
A burden I couldn’t shake,
A sinking ship no one could save,
A lost diver no one could find.
My heart is an ocean, and it’s broken.
Toxins sink into in, dumped by people without a care for my creatures:
“You’re too sensitive,”
“Fat,”
“Ugly,”
“Stupid,”
“Quiet,”
“Weak,”
“You’ll never amount to anything,”
“You’re a failure; a freak.”
Plastic bags of words and oil barrels full of pain
Stretch and stretch across my waters.
Pollution beyond what my little hands and my oblivious loved ones could clean out in a lifetime,
They infect my once beautiful heart.
What was once an ocean of emotions,
Good and bad,
Now is a sea of sorrow,
Sunlight all but forgotten.
The tar has killed all my sweet animals,
My wonderful hopes and dreams.
What was left were nightmares:
With lionfish and snaggletooth,
With tiger sharks and bull,
With Sea Nettle jellyfish and Australian box,
My heart is an ocean, and it’s become a warzone.
The violence would break the surface of my heart often,
Bursts of rage from blood-stained waters,
Biting sharks and unlucky touches,
Venom sprawled in this sea.
Jellyfish entangle,
Sting after sting and tearing into each other with no regard,
The damages blankets the waters.
Battleships,
Torpedoes,
Bloodshed,
War.
I fight I didn’t start,
Didn’t want,
Was infiltrating my heart.
I didn’t want it.
My heart is an ocean,
One full of struggle,
So I cover it.
I cover it in algae,
Hoping to suffocate my dreams and nightmares,
My hopes and my disappointments.
I encase my ocean in a shell,
A mask none shall see behind.
I become a fake,
To avoid being a failure.
They try to fight,
To breach the top and show the truth,
But I refused.
When my hopes try to live again and fight the nightmares,
When my nightmares try to conquer my hopes,
I tell them all,
“No. Go back.
Go back to the depths of my heart,
To bottom of this shrinking sea,
And never come back.”
Because the world will never accept them,
Never understand the loving dolphins,
Nor the enraged tiger sharks.
They’d only see the outside,
A thin layer of lies that none will look past.
And I no longer saw the point in trying to get them to see more.
With my drowned hopes and nightmares,
I wanted to quiet the skies,
Quiet them with ignorance,
For even I could not get rid of the sky;
At least,
Not completely.
My heart is an ocean,
One that longer changed.
It was one of falsehood,
Of solitude,
And an overcoat of emptiness.
My heart was deeper than anyone could’ve known,
And no one will know.
Even as hail raged across the sky,
Fires spark the oil-algae mixes,
Carcasses of my creatures floating within the mask,
I would smile.
I would laugh.
I would tease.
But not a sliver of sunlight would be seen,
Only hurricanes.
The algae began to layer as I aged,
To the point where my animals couldn’t even hear the ever-pouring weather.
Years went by in a staggered status,
No direction in mind;
Nothing.
Until:
“Why are you like this?”
Simple words,
Simple questions,
Simples answers…
Or were they?
I could no longer dig down into the depths of my heart,
The mask was too thick.
Impenetrable,
By my friends,
My family,
Or even me.
But I told anyway.
Words matching with emotions from a far off shore,
Creating more miles between the two the longer it goes.
And once it was over,
I let my heart cry,
Alone with no shoulder to lean on,
Because my heart was ocean to be seen by no one.
I laid my fascade on thicker after that,
Playing a role in a film no one knew was being shot.
Every action,
Precise,
Calculated,
And absolutely,
Completely,
Fake.
When I showed rage to the outside world,
My heart would be cloudy.
To others,
I was quick to anger.
To me,
I was down in a spiraling whirlpool of something.
What it was,
I didn’t know,
But my distance from my ocean,
Made it indescribable.
I only knew,
It wasn’t what I showed.
But I wanted no part in it,
That sinking sensation that plagued me.
It was a burden,
An anchoring attachment that was drowning me,
And maybe even everybody around me.
It was a pain beyond that of the greatest injury,
An invisible stonefish barb digging into my soul.
My heart is an ocean,
One in great peril.
Words would get to my ocean at times,
No matter how hard I try to block it.
And at times,
The animals would come,
Breaching the surface after so long.
With them came the rain,
The sobs,
The sensitive nature I wanted to stuff,
The unnecessary feelings.
My heart is an ocean,
And it’s building towards destruction.
With battleships above,
Torpedoes tearing through,
And bodies upon bodies,
Both animals and humans alike,
Litter the ocean floor.
Conflict rips through my ecosystem,
Breaking me and my oceanic heart.
And,
For once,
The outside reflected my heart;
I’d snapped,
After years of pretending,
Being someone else,
For the sake of myself.
I hide away after the break,
An enormous wave of water swelling in my heart.
Blame,
Guilt,
Horror.
“Was it my fault?”
Stares pierce me,
Sharp sea glass ripping through with each.
They gawk at my rainfall,
Puzzle at my tides,
And judge my marine life with their bullets.
My heart is an ocean,
And it’s dying.
I look down on it,
Broken and battered,
Caught in a war that others may have started,
But I continued.
I continued living in those times,
On ignoring the so-called “weakness”,
And letting the past drag me down to the deepest of trenches.
So I peer down at the algae,
Combing over the mask,
And dig for what is beyond.
My animals wanted freedom,
To see the sun,
To see my feelings that I’d shoved down.
I couldn’t live like this,
One buried in emptiness and lies.
Sealing everything away,
Letting it die in the depths,
Does nothing.
Piece by piece,
I remove the algea,
Smashed away the pain,
Replaced the harm with those of love.
My heart is an ocean,
And it’s finally begin to heal.
New life coming in,
Battleships sailing away,
Coexistence becomes possible,
For my dreams and nightmares no longer war,
And my ocean is no longer forcefully still.
My heart is an ocean,
One that tells my story,
A story of pain,
And healing;
Of despair,
And hope;
Of nightmares,
And dreams.
My heart is an ocean,
And it’s not one to be hidden,
But to be shown.