Crocodile Tears

The passengers shout:
Stay away from our boat!
Your crocodile tears
won't shame us.
You have tears
but tough skin
and sit too long alone
in ancient, hard un-needing.

Our gods do not cry,
and we do not care if they do,
for ours are the true tears of suffering.
Wailed into shallow holes
that fill the Instagram wells
of our dime store traumas
and nickel weeklies.
We stage tattooed lovers
in six pack embraces on the beach
but your tears
are feedless and unfollowed.

The captain bears the boat away
a little further from the shore.
He could speak to them of Nietzsche
and of fouling a hermit's well,
but the crowd has grown impatient
and there is nothing he can sell.

He commands the helmsman not from fear
but the crew have sighted spears.
He knows the crowd has grown too large
to huddle in their huts,
so when a threat swims up this near
they only know to cut.

And as the crocodile slips beneath
to plumb the bottom of was and will be
no rusted hull could stand up his Congo
to reach its inner station.
No Marlow prepared to see what's on his shore
and few with the compassion
to lie to Kurtz's intended.

Grasping, twisting, turning,
he drowns us.
From the shallows to the deep
he brings us.
To where we are too cowardly to go,
without hesitation he follows.