Nathaniel Calhoun
negative buoyancy
overlaid by a swarm in which we have poor representation
we feed solitude to narrative engines honed on a narrow
range of grievances passed-over junior officers rancorous
slouching or this moment in plank pose tax their umbilicus
to a throttle point | we no longer move in murmurations
we are herded | termite towers emerge too close to our
shelters a lopsided world of dubious roofs barely stable
on one wavelength | isolation vinegars unguilded minds
goiters in our math yield to an omni-potentiality a star
furnace yoked to our laziness | hoarding ravaged
inhalations ridden past salvaging compulsory huffs
before the baleen heave our lungs fill with frothy blood
and the pressure gauge doesn’t mean every being will be
crushed hadal zones piezolytes water swims un-
bothered through unbothered water indigestible signatures
tempt vanta fish toasted by lava tubes in the crushing
trench technicolour microns lodge in sea turtles blurred
by a jellyfish sea something’s always comfortable where
ever you stray habituated indicating | is there a name
for the point beyond which we become negatively buoyant
and how far out must we go to have zero chance of orbiting
earth | droplets in a deluge breach from the noise of
statistical insignificance and burst like a beached whale
from the great unraveling assumptions of every earlier
era | maybe in a smaller tribe we might have lasted