Drawing the line on the horizon

This photo is filed under Waltham Forest, wedged in-between Wam Bam Island and a beach Wakudoki video. Inside my collectionem, my gathering together, I have chanties, postcards, engravings, adverts, love-letters, watercolours and a number of haikus. It is a salt-water taxonomy. A maritime nomenclature. An encyclopedia of Davy Jones locker. It is perhaps narcissistic to collect one’s own portrait but I’ve worked at it for centuries, since time began. You see I am the wet, the frontier and the beyond, the mother of the shipwreck, the surf. I draw the line on the edge of the horizon. Pulled by the moon, I am the possible, the gravitational dream. People come to me requesting holidays, adventure, money, liberation and food. They cross and enter me to reach another land, to meet the other side of disaster or persecution, to lose themselves, to be reborn in my oxygenless immensity. To my swell, I attract refugees, hunters, sailors, lovers, businessmen, poets, painters and families. By the lacework of foam on the edge of my waves, they envisage life otherwise. To and fro. Fro and to. I am the water, the salty, tidal, undrinkable kind. I cover seventy percent of the earth with my cloak. I am this photograph. I am the sea.