Brentley Frazer: Listerine™ on skinned knees

Your whale tethered to a pier is
symbol of the difference between
our generations, this process of
being that fosters experience,
this treacle dimension in which
the unknown discovers itself.

It’s gotten thinner this syrup,
since you ran for your brother
showing the discovery, the dead
docked mammal knocking its skull
on the pylons. You didn’t mention
it but I could imagine the shrieking

of children, the squeak of swings,
the fact that you could back then
still see lobsters in the rock ponds,
an octopus in the shadows of the jetty.

Where are we going now my friend?
All of us I mean, billions on a
pebble soaring through a void,
circling one another as gulls
around a jellyfish on the sand;
why do you now cower in the shadow

of the other, under the tongue of
the mirror self, soft as the incest
of wings, the summer when you first
loved? I remember as though yesterday
pouring Listerine‚Äö?묢 on my sister’s
skinned knees and the way they

continued to bleed through her
stockings at church. She screamed so
the neighbour looked over our fence,
yet the world turns on, none-the-less.