LIBERATION

The bass thrums within the marrow of the bone, striking the same deep chord as the tide against a rotting pier. Every syllable carries the heat of midday sun. The ink smells of brine and dried cedar. I anchor my life in the deep blue of a single vowel.

Trade winds move through the air thick with hibiscus and wet stone, and the pen answers, gliding across the white sand of the page. Freedom opens in the jagged space between the snare and the kick. A sentence gathers force and becomes a wave, jungle pressing toward foam. I live inside that rhythm, the crash and recoil of the surge.

Shorelines steady the restless mind. I plant my feet in the warm silt of a phrase and feel the undertow tug at my balance. Language flows like a current from reef to open sea, bearing both the weight of rusted anchor and the lift of sail. In its movement, I recover my compass.

The melody lifts, wide and assured, and claims the sky in a single sweep. My voice carries across the turquoise expanse. Rhythm holds firm beneath me, the only ground I trust. With each breath, the island rises from ink.

Salt gathers along the skin as the stanza deepens. The horizon shifts outward with each new line. I trace the spine of a mountain with the nib, shaping peaks against a bruised dusk. Light settles in the curve of a C and rests in the hollow of an O.

Pressure gathers in the chest like weather turning. The break comes in a flash of language, a crack of sound that splits the air clean. Through arrangement alone, I summon tide and wind and sky. The poem becomes a vessel, and I let it carry what the body cannot hold.

When the final period falls, quiet moves through the grove. The percussion lingers in the sway of palms. I stand at the center of a world made by ink, the page bearing witness to the pulse that built it.

In that stillness, I find my liberation.