This is my first post on this wonderful site and, coincidentally, the first time I am really sharing a poem of mine.  I'm afraid it isn't that refined, or particularly good, but I think it's going somewhere I like and to a place I inhabit often in my mind. I'll have to sit with it more before it becomes more what I want for it to be, but in the meantime I'd love to see what everyone thinks!
...
I love and long to walk by the sea

Where the sand softly sifts

Through my tired, cracked toes.

Where, as I dreamily bend to sit,

A seagull scares me straight up.

So I continue to consider, as I walk,

What this mind is, and to whom this body belongs.

And my thoughts crash among the crackling shells

Being tossed up to the dry sand

Where I, a mere passerby,

Brighten my face to a smile,

Relishing the intricate lace

Of black lines and purple sheen

Held on this mussel shell,

Whose beauty is a memory of its wet life,

When its body reached, timorously,

Out into the flowing ocean

—Just as my mind longs to leap—

Absorbing its needs from the finite expanse.

 

Yet my mind reaches to the ocean

In false hope that it is not finite,

That the illusion of the horizon is actually true,

And that what my eye can see really is infinity,

Not just another body

Continuously stretching,

Reaching, breaking,

Forming, conforming

To the world and its interminable restrictions.

 

I feel my mind seeping

Into the fantastical almost-feeling

Of my body growing out

In tendrils that expand to become part

Of that sifting sand, those exfoliating grains

Illusively stretching on forever

Uniting with the endlessly crashing waves.

Salty, mineral, forever expanding but held

Around that one crystal,

That one grain,

That one shell,

That one mind.

 

The one is infinity

And

Infinity the one.

 

What is the illusion?