thirteen ways of looking at a sinking ship

I
The air is sharp with the smell of the sea; the salt, the ice, the immensity of the rise and fall, the breathing of a slumbering titan. The cold is like knives and the silence thicker than the mist.

II
They won’t stop screaming. Like knives (knives again, always knives) in the rising tide, echoing into the dark waters, shouts and pleas and cries. Enough to make you dizzy.

III
It’s far too cold for this. Not to mention early. I want to go back to sleep. What does it matter, really? So much metal and so much life, what does it matter? My eyes are closing again already.

IV
Soft music plays in the slowly rocking, dimly lit room, half-forgotten guitar chords; stop, he tells me. Stop.

V
The world tilts itself around me. And when I look in the mirror, I see myself. Myself and myself and nothing else.

VI
I don’t want to die like this. Pale and quiet and icy cold, no, this isn’t what I wanted—I always dreamed of dying by fire, of drowning in a fiery pool of lava, of kissing someone so hard I combust into flames, of screaming so loud my throat tears—blazing gold and hot and loud and beautiful. I don’t want this, I really don’t, and it’s too cold to even scream about it.

VII
No one ever told you what it would feel like, standing on the deck of a sinking ship and waiting for the sun to rise. No one told you how empty you would feel, how all the ugly things growing in your chest would shrink and wither and fall, how you would wait—ecstatic, impatient, unbearably and joyously empty—for the sun to rise. Anytime now, you decide, after consulting your watch. 

VIII
The janitor says he doesn’t have enough mops to clean all this up and the old woman next to him says she hasn’t packed her bathing suit and the child beside them both says he left his rubber duck behind and the young man sitting near them gets out his phone and live-tweets the whole thing and the girl next to him opens Spotify and types in, songs for when the ship ur on is sinking. 

IX
You clutch the icy railing and look up at the stars. There’s no metaphor here. The ship sinks.

X
The water stirs with life and the anticipation of it; metal groans high above as thousands of tiny intelligences swirl below. Soon, they seem to know. Soon there will be something new here, something all for them, rusting whalebones and everything within them, a colossal ribcage with all the flesh rotting in it. A feast and a home to have it in.

XI
cringe ass ship SINKS lol (not clickbait)

XII
I built that ship. I created it, grew the steel out of my fingernails, spat out the glass and pulled the rest right out of my skin, and it’s as much a part of me as the eyes that watch it sink now. My fingers itch as the metal groans in the distance.

XIII
The ship sinks. The sun won't rise for a long time, so you wait for it. It's silent, they scream, you wait, you sleep. The ship sinks.

(Art: Sea and Rain, 1865, by James Abbott McNeill Whistler)

Sort of based on Wallace Stevens's Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, except not really? The structure, at least. The Thirteen Ways thing? The sinking ship part is because I was listening to this song by Wild Child. And all the ice and cold stuff is just because...there's a storm outside and it's cold right now.