A Letter From the Atlantic

Dear Ian,

I am writing to humbly request that you stop trying to use me as inspiration for poetry.  Yes, I know that I let you pee in me*, but I have to draw the line somewhere.  It is not that your verse in inherently bad... I mean, it is, but that is not what I take issue with.  Were I to address every line of awful poetry put forth on my account, I would be constantly writing notices and would probably just draft a form letter.  No, yours is especially intolerable because it is fraught with precious concepts ensconced in banal inaccuracies. I would like to point out a few of them.

First of all, you were musing wistfully about whether you were standing in the essentially same water as the Pacific Ocean.  The answer is "No, you're not." Water molecules are all unique, regardless of their similar chemical reactivity.  I am certain that if I heated you to 212 degrees, you would react the same way most people would as well.  I am going to go ahead and anticipate your wanky post-modern rebuttal of "But there is no essence that marks water as 'Atlantic' and 'Pacific', humans made up those handles, all the water is one."  You clearly followed this logic as you spoke your desires underneath waves, as though this "unified water of the world" is your personal messaging system.  Did you receive a response?  No, you did not, so stop reading Buddhist texts summarized on people's blogs.  Or is this that David Foster Wallace graduation speech again?  Ugh, that keeps popping up, and whenever it does I get people staring at me saying "This is water. This is water.", while estimated figures of their student loan debt flash through their mind.

And then, as though completely unaware of how this contradicts the thought you just had, you started trying to phrase the process of how the specific water that heard your words will spread them gradually until all the water carries your message, a thorough display of both narcissism and poor knowledge of geography. Watching you try to weave metaphors from that was like trying to watch someone build a sand castle with an empty soda can.

Also, that butterfly did not land on your head because you were born of the universal salt waters an hour prior and it wanted to grant you new life, and it was not lured by the traces of life-giving sea salt.  It was lured by your shiny bald spot.  If you want to write a poem about that, be my guest, but keep me out of it.

I know that you heard a song called "Dead Sea" last night and you may feel like the Dead Sea or that you are wandering the Dead Sea, but guess what? I consulted the internet and discovered that neither of us are the Dead Sea.  If I was the Dead Sea, then that crab that punctured your toe would not have been there (because, as you acutely observed, very few creatures can live in the Dead Sea), and if you were the Dead Sea, you would be several thousand miles away and full of people with nasty skin conditions who are too cheap to buy ointment.

Your version of "if you love someone, let them go, etc" adapted for the ocean was nothing short of hackneyed, not to mention full of human privilege assumptions.  First of all, way to go for the first and most basic concept of the tide.  Second, do you know who decides whether something returns from the ocean?  Me.  I know that from your perspective, it may appear as though people are acting of their own agency, that is a very carefully performed act.  If the ocean was involved in that saying, it would read "If you love someone, let them go, unless it is in the ocean, in which case you should hold on to them until they are safe on dry land."

In closing, your pathetic meandering thought process is not only amateurish and full of fallacies, it is boring, and that says a lot coming from me, my favorite show is "Continental Drift".  Good luck continuing to compose verse that is a Wes Anderson parody of thought provoking or deep.

Fuck you and suck my balls**,

The Atlantic Ocean

*Actually, that's kind of a turn-on. Oh god, don't tell anyone I said that though.

**Of course I have balls. If you didn't go to a Catholic school, you'd know this.