Mocha

My life has been spent beneath you

Under you, yet still I am feared

The same way you fear the waves you ride chasing after some white-pipe dream,

Me,

To you nantucketers 

My sandpaper exterior and oily interior 

Is like striking gold while panning in the Congo River

Mocha Dick, Moby, my name, a fable

A crown you could wear like the barnacles atop my head

If you strike me just the right way

You pay attention to the way I spout, according to you, like a “powerful steam engine” 

As though am I any different from my fellow whales

I also eat krill

I also swim in warm waters

I also watch the fish swim by

I also sing into the depths

I also sleep suspended

I also breach, as high as I can,

If i had the hands that carry the harpoons 

I could reach for the sun

But for now I expose my belly to it and get a glimpse

Of what I’m missing out on

Gravity pulls me back home

One hundred skirmishes 

Eighty evasions

Twenty Pequods

I’d find it funny that you couldn’t catch the biggest fish in the sea

If it weren’t me

My days are spent in a glimmering blue abyss

I have done nothing

Yet fingers point at me

For the swallowing of your Jonah, your leg,

Those fingers lower to its torrey pine table

Their owners biting into fat with ivory teeth

And light your blubber candle

Funded by my mother

And my mothers mother

And my mothers mothers mother

They’re martyrs now apparently 

Apparently everyone's a martyr

Everyone I know

You’d think the most powerful creatures out there could figure something else out

But the nantucketers 

Report to the manufacturer

Who report to the wholesaler

Who report to the board

Who report to the shareholder

Who report back to say they have no choice

And also I’m just a whale

What do I know

Beyond the stabs of harpoons from above

And Ahab's words

You are all Ahab to me

But I didn’t die to him