flotsam - SCP Foundation

"Seven seals for seven brides,"

you tell yourself your sacred lies.

Your family has got their eyes

in every corner of your lives,

and so you make your sacrifice

and break the living sacrifice

upon the jagged sea-soaked bones on which they built your faith.

"I'm not like them" you love to say,

your favorite words for any day

where blood and guts and bone shards sway

the faith that is your price to pay

for food and shelter, beds to lay

on sleepless nights after you pray

for rescue from the sea-soaked bones on which they built your faith.

Are you complicit, evil, or

a victim of the Scarlet shore

that floods the streets reserved for poor

forgotten men, who long for more

than rats and dirt, the daily chore

of playing pauper, beggar, whore,

for greater men whose birthright spares such sea-soaked, wretched fates.

Although…

"My name could have been yours."

"I wear the scale of snakes."

"You have a choice, I swear I swear I swear I swear I swear I swear-

And all at once, their metal fin

is plunged into his serpent skin

to cut from him his wicked sin.

Upon the ribs of whales, they pin

the wicked man among his kin:

the sinners, whores, and those who've been

a danger to the brotherhood built 'pon a sea-soaked faith.

Had it been you who held the knife?

Had it been you who took his life,

condemned him to an afterlife

of faith sustained through lack of strife?

But no, you hadn't held the knife.

You know you hadn't held the knife,

so why, then, are your fingers slick with such sudden unfaith?

Your skin is slimy, slick, inflamed

with Scarlet, fev'rish faith, unclaimed

by all the sinful filth ashamed

to admit truth. For those ordained

by Scarlet…

Really?

You know you have a name.

Is it so far from snakes

or deer or whales or butterflies or normal men with hope-filled eyes-

They find you packing up your bag

and escort you (with smiles, sad)

to bright-lit rooms, where dressed in flag

your loving family, ragtag,

proclaims to you "you're our comrade,

we're there for you when all is bad"

and so, again, your will's subsumed in wretched, sea-soaked faith.

Fit to drown, you're fit to drown,

you're fit to, fit to, fit to drown,

you're only really fit to drown

in surefire fitness to drown

in drowning drownings, drowning down

the drowning drain where all hope drowned

the moment circumstance declared your wretched, sea-soaked fate.

And yet…

This can't be all there is.

Weren't you kin of the snake,

who looked like you and spoke like you and surely could have once been you?

Who lived his life in three ideas,

unconstrained by seven lines?

Living, breathing,

and achieving

(faced with death!) a peace of mind?

So you run,

and through every difficult step,

through every screaming synapse longing for the comfort of rhyme schemes,

through the remnants of (what couldn't be called) the life snatched away by the sea,

you take in the absence of structure

and sigh in relief as the wind kisses the skin where the tumor once was.