Seaside Dead

Lawson Lin

How I wept alone on my childhood bed;

Salt-stained, held by my mother, crying,

As it smelled sweetly of the seaside dead.

Such misery was then my daily bread

Show me a thing from it not worth burying—

How I wept alone on my childhood bed!

On bloated limbs I went abroad and fled

Drifting on a ship of barnacles, drying,

As it smelled sweetly of the seaside dead.

Salt on wounds stinging from words left unsaid:

“You are seen, through the lying and denying

How you wept alone on your childhood bed”

Warm embrace gave omens to ancient dreads;

In their shallow graves rotting, yet undying,

As it smelled sweetly of the seaside dead.

Odysseus came home, returning to tread:

An old path untaken; crimes un-decried!

Of how I wept alone on my childhood bed,

As it smelled sweetly of the seaside dead.

Lawson Lin was most likely named after a Japanese grocery store chain by his kindergarten English teacher back in Dalian, China. Following the same bizarre vein, he finds himself on the edges of many liminal experiences, such as navigating migration and neurodiversity. His passions are cats, cooking, and cycling. He is new to poetry and enjoys it as a bridge to places of phantasmal familiarity.