Mermaid Bones - a beat poem

Content notification: Sexual assault and eating disorders

Mermaid Bones - a beat poem.

I'm hiding an ocean of teeth under my scales
it's in the forbidden taste of salt on my tongue
the weight of the measuring tape,
of those numbers pushing bubbles through my blood and through my gums.
It's written on the circumference of my waist.
In the words cursing the ghost ship of my shape being plundered against my will.
It's spoken by the fish telling me that I have no right to fill my gills with oxygen
underneath a sea bed of regret laid heavy with the shape of a tail.
You are a whale they said
and they made me push my bones out to see the fish bones that they could wish on
to beach myself on the sand reaching for a reason to say "no"
No.
I will not make sandcastles out of sandwiches, and pick at the entrails of the jellyfish noodles on my plate on the first date with puberty that said
"you will now be endowed with an oyster set with strings of pearls that hang heavy round your throat like a noose of silence and rules
kilojoules killing you as they de-bate you on
whether or not you're human enough to warrant the human right to decide on what to do
with this body you were born into.
You abuse it because they abused you
you have shut your mouth with hooks that pierce the flesh and bring you closer to death
drowning in oxygen is an oxymoron
just like starving for freedom and screaming to be seen and heard
when your lips are sewn closed by your own hands
and hands that keep trying to cook you over gas or silence your song
just in case you might sing sailors to their death on rocks with your anger and your truth.

And when they pluck you from the tide, slice you open and look at your insides,
they will say that you're too small to nourish them
as if your body was something they could glut themselves upon
to satisfy their own needs.
They breathed disgust as you disappeared into the seaweed, hiding in the deep, trying to make the smallest ripples in the world
while they trawled the sea for bigger fish to hook.
They will look upon you as sport
and confuse your body with a humpback whale
not for its beauty, or its power
not for its song, and it's slow
sorrowful grace.
But they will look upon you as a whale to hump
to dump on expectations and lust
to tell you that you must appeal to their narrow definitions
and contrition
so that you turn to your own body as ammunition
to kill your own heartbeat and wage internal warfare.
They snare you with their words
groper fish pushing their mouths closer
trying to take you down to sleep with those fishes
to sleep with them on a mattress erected to silence your voice.
So you subsist on nothing but promises to yourself to grow
smaller
in order to keep them away
hiding the curves of the bay under an oversized t-shirt.

But then you hear that song, echoing in the blue, and it sinks into your bones, and makes ripples in your soul.
And you realise that the trails left in the sand by crustaceans are breadcrumbs to find your way back home
and you pick them up, one by one,
the way you walked along the shore collecting shells as a girl
and you hold them up to the whorl of your ear
and listen.
Listen for the sound of the ocean in you.
and slowly
the mad seas breathe life back into your form
you gather power and gaia magic, and see them for what they are
you put throw the pain and shame and anger back to whom it belongs
and you are reborn home into your body that was never

wrong.