In the morning, walking through bands of sun coming through the clouds, on sand walking towards the rocks with books and coffee held, walking slow, with slow looks at horizons and girls and circling birds, with a quiet mind awaiting coalescent words -- past pigeons preening and prancing for crumbs past the sunday preacher, past the bums on their benches, who all know me by name, past leyla dancing again for the same god she danced for yesterday and past the rock where I saw my mermaid last dark against the pale sky silhouetted plain as though she were only MY sky come to profane I see her, again. She pulls herself from water to rock, nails scribbling breaking on the wetted rock, water dribbling from salt-tortured hair, rough and tangled and from under at me her dark eyes angled. I see the sinews in her swarthy arms, tendons under dark and oily skin ripple and she beckons with her scrag-nailed hand and her scales grate in the sand. Dark scales, luminous and long shine paler where the rock has scraped them, rhine on the rock chafes her water belly, dries in rings on the burnt sugar skin of her human parts, lines the furrows on her face -- in air and sun she ever cries, in air too long she dies. With strong arms she strains to hold the taut points of her breasts from the harsh rock, fraught with mute desire she keens like hounds on a scent she leans against our restraints. The sea smell of her taints the air, her cloaca opens and closes and she draws me even in my revulsion she can cause me to come to her yearn for her burn for her. Her mouth opens, her pointed teeth glisten, head tilted against the sea wind I listen and she sings for me. Off the rocks of the cliffs it rings over me songs that aren't meant to be voiced in open air. Then she slithers, slides off the rock, back to her lair and the day withers and wanes -- What was not minutes but was hours, and she remains in the scribbled words in broken-spined notebooks that lay around me letting darkness surround me, I walk home through the empty park -- Dark, dark, dark and cruel her marque.