The Cursed Ink of Forgotten Tides

The sea, that ravenous archivist, had clutched it close for years,
Till tides, grown weary of its weight, spat forth the script of tears.
A boy’s hand once had trembled here, in lamplight’s fevered glow,
To etch his soul in iron-gall, before the deep’s overthrow.

*O you who find this cipher—if such grace the fates allow—*
*Know I was Edmund, lyreless bard, who kissed time’s furrowed brow.*
*These words, my final breath made stone, I fling to mercy’s storm,*
*Lest all I loved and loathed be lost to chronology’s reform.*

He wrote of cliffs that gnawed the clouds, of gulls that screamed like steel,
Of mornings smeared in honey-light where shadows would congeal—
But most he traced the hourglass whose unrelenting grains
Devoured his twenty summers whole, yet left their crimson stains.

*“The curse,” he quilled, “was never writ in witch’s venom’d tongue,*
*But in the ache to clutch the dawn while eve’s dark hymn is sung.*
*Each verse I birthed turned sepia, each metaphor decayed,*
*As futures I could never claim mocked from their gilded shade.”*

They say he walked the shingle’s edge, where foam and futures fray,
Conducting symphonies for waves that stole his last crotchet.
His eyes—twin chalices of storm—drank deep the brine’s refrain,
While in his pockets, shards of verse wore smooth as seaglass pain.

One dusk, when winds unstitched the waves from horizon’s taut thread,
A shape emerged from fathoms where the drowned sun makes its bed—
Not ship nor leviathan, but a woman forged of spray,
Her hair a whirlpool’s languor, her gaze the milky way.

*“Sweet scribe,” she sang, “thy quill’s lament has stirred my liquid throne,*
*What bargain wouldst thou strike with she who owns what time has flown?*
*A draught from Lethe’s underflow to numb thy chronic ache?*
*Or tides reversed to resurrect what years have forced to break?”*

He stood, a sapling bent by truths too ancient to be borne,
And watched her palms cup phosphor stars plucked from the nocturne’s thorn.
*“I crave no draught,” the poet pled, “nor sorcery’s false dawn—*
*But stay, divine archivist, and name what must be pawned.”*

Her laughter curled like riptides snuffing lanterns on the shore,
*“To cage one transient moment, poets pay with epochs’ store.*
*Each syllable preserved shall steal three more from fate’s clenched hand.*
*Choose, child—thy art’s eternity, or sands… just sands… just sand…”*

The moon bled silver on the pact sealed there in kelp and gloom,
As Edmund grasped the stylus dipped in his own heartbeat’s plume.
All night the cliffs roared psalms of warning none but gulls could parse,
While in the bay, ten thousand clocks chimed from the ocean’s heart.

At first, the curse wore beauty’s mask—each stanza he composed
Congealed to immortality while all the village dozed.
His sonnets stiffened into marble in the public square,
His ballads chimed in chapel bells, his hymns perfumed the air.

But soon the ledger of his theft came due in whispered tolls—
The baker’s daughter, mid-laugh, froze into a porcelain scroll.
His mother’s final breath became an epitaph’s stark comma,
And lovers, mid-embrace, were carved as statues of diploma.

Horror-struck, he fled to where the sea’s raw throat could roar,
Clutching his poison-quill as waves gnawed at the guilt-slick shore.
*“Undo this damnéd contract!” (Thus his shredded plea began)*
*“Take back your cursed immortality—I’ll be a fleeting man!”*

But the surf just yawned its foam-white scorn against the barnacled stones,
While deep below, the brine-witch grinned amongst her coral bones.
Her voice rose thick as kraken’s ink: *“The pact, once struck, is law—*
*Thou art the hourglass’s clerk, the past’s grim bailiff now.”*

Madness then, his sole consort in those years of endless now,
He scrawled his palinodes on rocks the tides would disavow.
Each morning found his verses gone, erased by surf’s broad palm,
Yet still he wrote, a Sisyphus with parchment for his stone.

Until one autumn, when the sea inhaled and held its breath,
He penned not with the fatal quill, but with a gull’s dropped feather.
No curse attended this frail script, this elegy of sand—
Just mortal words that trembled like a candle in each hand.

*“Forgive me, unborn reader, for the beauty I have marred,*
*For every timeless sonnet stole some moment I’d not barter.*
*This final verse I render not to last, but to depart—*
*A breath, a ripple, soon dissolved… and therein lies the art.”*

He sealed the leaf within a flask once brimmed with apothecary’s woe,
And cast it to the Judas waves that watched him turn and go.
Back to the cliffs where first he’d damned himself with beauty’s snare,
Now just a shadow hungry for the dusk’s unflinching stare.

They say he stepped as dancers step toward a lover’s beckoning arm,
Into the maw of tempests where no elegy could harm.
The sea, that fickle patron, neither mourned nor cheered his fall—
Just rolled his name in pebble-chorus till it meant nothing at all.

Centuries later, when the bottle kissed the shore’s damp cheek,
A child pried the message loose with nails still pink and weak.
She read aloud to gulls and crabs and winds that feigned to listen,
As Edmund’s final words dissolved like mist the sun would christen.

Now wanderers on that haunted coast, when tides retreat to rest,
Claim voices weave through moonlit brine—a poet’s late bequest.
Not marble epitaphs that shout through aeons cold and blind,
But whispers of surrendered things left gracefully behind.

And in the town where statues weep slow tears of lichened stone,
Where clock hands stutter, haunted by a debt they can’t atone,
There blooms a fragile wisdom, bittersweet and seldom heard:
That beauty, when untethered from decay, becomes the cruelest word.