Spliced

Poseidon was losing the arms race. And the gender war to boot. No glass ceiling beneath the waves. Steel and petroleum on its surface took vessels out of range of his emphysemic breath. He ditched his antediluvian trident and resorted to modern ordnance in the form of nuclear tipped torpedoes. But his consort Amphitrite, somewhat listless from her menial rank in the lists of numinous Greeks, more ‘trite’ than ‘amphi-‘, set to play with his new toys.

The airmen far from home turf painted their fuselages with one of a bevy of pinup beauties. Like the prow figureheads on ships, these muses and angels were charged with delivering them back safe and sound from each mission. Back into the bosom of life. But as the tide of the war turned in their favour, the boys got cocky on the wing, while their officers were uneasy with such lubricious representations of the women they were fighting for back home. So the warpaint migrated towards the nose cone, where the natural contours of steel and canvas under the propellers lent itself perfectly for the depiction of a raptorial maw. Shark mouths replete with blood-tipped teeth became the norm. Their kamikaze enemy were actually the ones desperately plunging their unadorned Zeros into the water, making themselves shark food in their miss-the-boat attempt to stave off defeat.

Spliced

Poseidon had spotted a vessel that got his goat. The passengers having spliced the mainbrace and hurling their empty messageless bottles into his main. And to top it off, a sea captain who had seemingly affixed a Cat-In the-Hat-A-Ma-Ran billowing sail for his rig. So the Greek anti-ship magnate, the depleted deity, grabbed for his new blowpipe, unaware as to its metamorphosis at the ennuied hand of his anomied wife. The torpedo launcher was now streamlined in the form of a lipstick tube, its kiss tipped missile puckering and smacking a crimson gash in the hull of his target. Less “Raft of The Medusa”, more a Pop Art “Fishing For Souls”. The lips and mouth formed a perfectly serviceable life raft, though the enamel dolmens contained within somewhat reduced the human stowage capacity. Slightly groggy, the ship’s captain cracked open another bottle of Bollinger and quaffed in order to reset the vertical hold that had registered tilt.