A man looks back over his life and tracks it by one habit: watching an ocean that isn't there. NevermindLogic's poem has no title, only a row of asterisks, and it begins like a casual memory before drifting somewhere stranger. Its central idea is that imagination doesn't wither as we age. It deepens, carrying the speaker from observer to participant, until the final image leaves us unsure whether he has found peace or something more unsettling.
The structure is a simple ladder of three rungs, each marked by a time phrase: "When I was a young man," "As I got older," "And now that I am older." The speaker's body changes with each. First he sits on "a small lawn chair" behind a "picket fence," safely at a distance. Then he stands, and the senses multiply: he hears "seagulls or tourists" and lets the water "run over the ends of my exposed toes." Finally he is sitting again, but now "at the bottom of the ocean." The sea has crept from the horizon to his feet and then over his head. The lawn chair and fence, with their suburban neatness, drop out of the poem, as if the boundary between his yard and the sea has dissolved.
The language of unreality shifts quietly along the way. The ocean is first "invisible," then the water is "imaginary," and by the end it is "harmless." The speaker stops insisting that the sea isn't real and starts asking whether it can hurt him. There is also a small inversion in the first stanza: the waves themselves "Wade over the pavement," a verb we'd normally give to a person. The ocean takes on the cautious, ankle-deep movement of a visitor, and the road becomes a shoreline. Even the phrase "seagulls or tourists" has a gentle uncertainty in that "or." He can't quite tell whether the sounds are birds or people, as if the daydream is leaking into his hearing.
The last stanza holds the poem's strangest and most interesting moves. Its details are oddly calm: "arms resting on my crossed legs," a posture like a child on a classroom floor or someone meditating. Yet the ground beneath him is "rough cement." The real road survives under the imagined sea, so the fantasy doesn't replace the world but floods it. The grammar changes too. The earlier stanzas use the past habitual ("would sit," "I'd even hear"), but the last shifts to the present: "I like to sit." The story has caught up with the speaker, and the choice is still happening.
Then comes the final line: "And see if my lunges will fill with harmless water." The word "lunges" is presumably a slip for "lungs," and the meaning clearly points to breathing, though it's worth noticing that the misspelling accidentally adds a lurch of movement. What matters is the phrase "see if." He is not afraid or desperate but experimental, even curious. "Harmless water" in the lungs is a paradox, since water in the lungs is exactly what drowning means. The poem lets that contradiction stand. One reading is that he is testing how far his imagination can take him, to the point of dissolving the difference between air and water. Another, judging by the theme of ageing, is that he is rehearsing something final and trying to make it gentle. The poem never settles it.
Formally, the poem is free verse. There is no rhyme and no steady metre, and the diction is plain and conversational. Nearly every line ends in a comma, even where grammar doesn't call for one ("the waves of an invisible ocean, / Wade over the pavement"). The effect is a slow, wave-like drip of pauses, with each line rolling into the next without ever fully stopping. The repeated word "older" gives the stanzas a steady pulse, and its comparative form (never "old") suggests a life still in progress.
The poem's significance lies in this restraint. It takes a childlike game and lets it grow up with the player, without ever raising its voice. A reader may come away thinking about how our daydreams change with us, and about how unnervingly peaceful it can be to imagine going under.