A mermaid's memory of a lost sailor

Memory of a lost sailor:

By a Mermaid

Scarred the night skies are with misty tears

Whose shooting lights the darkness clear.

And as my eyes fade into the chasms,

I see a ship with butterflies instead of flags.

Let us be a ghost within a ghost1

And in that ghost the deliriums of opium smoke.

Pray! Listen to the singing of my silent voice

That haunts the tombs of long-dead fossils

Welcoming the arrival of castaway new cavemen.

Mountains of sand and volcanic rocks this place infest

And nobody knows when the woodland in fire was set.

The white stripped dome is being drowned by fog machines and fireflies

Blurring my vision of your ship fading away by the horizon sky.

No! Don’t sail away from this earthly “paradise”

Where no flowers grow, 

where no winds blow, 

where no water through the rivers flows!

Don’t disappear from my sight 

When the melodious swan 
who dwells in my mouth can make you mine! 

1. A direct allusion to O'Neill's "Long Day's Journey into Night" followed by a reworking of this same idea