Rucksack – Duffle bag – Backpack
                       Packed
Note books – Journal books – Poetry books
                    Book books
Tin cans – Pots and pans
         First aid – Survival kit
Complete with fishhooks, fishing line,
            Lighter, matches
  of the waterproof kind
                 Even a sewing kit
                                        Equipped
With extra sewing needles,
                       black thread, safety pins,
          Buttons,
                         Band-aids, gauze,
                antiseptics,
                        Burn cream
Just in case
                  it's ever needed
      Bucket hat Stuffed
              down somewhere deep
A handkerchief –
                          bandana too
      Flannels and sweater
                                       For cool weather
Tennis shoes
          For when hiking boots
     Get too hot
               A few days worth of food
     Vegetarian – salmon jerky – chocolate protein bars
                            Sleeping bag rolled tightly
            All slung heavily over my shoulder

“One fast move or I’m gone”
           Kerouac once said
   As he tried to run away from
     Crashing waves of stardom
        I just want to get away
      From crashing city noise
            And live life like a
              Dharma ***

I saw five blackbirds perched on a telephone wire at six am
They were black as the blackest of nights and as big as Caterpillars
They were looking down on cars taped over with blowing plastic bags
Floating in the hot pink wind like tornadoes made from lipstick
Their talons were long daggers looking to pierce the deepest part of my heart
To open my eyes with their meandering meaningful meaningless
They had shipwrecks adorning each obsidian feather and crooked teeth
Capped the nightmares that lurked behind the glare of their eyes
They watched solemnly at the scene below of closing doors
Of rustling papers and stained tears tarring the summer ground
They had secrets cawed in a language of screeched whispers
Warning and educating ears that were too deaf or too self involved to listen
We’ve got no chance to escape this drudgery of modernity
We’re stuck in this self-built prison of black and white prisms
Of three dimensional reasoning and the attitude that follows
Never meant to be but it’s what it is when we think we’re free
How can the one blind bird perceive things differently
If our shortsighted near-death experiences have left us numb
Numbing us to the presence of the stars in the morning sky
Or the Sun exploding torrents of fire during the night
Wrapping us in a chilly warmth like blankets soaked with gasoline
We've left ourselves to wander the desolate land thinking of the obscene


I saw five blackbirds blacking out the sun as they took to the sky
Laughing their murderous laugh at the awkward bipeds down below

My boat is broken. 
Pieced together from shipwrecks I've caused
Pieced together with the wretched lives I've taken. 
Ancient decrepit wood
nailed on in disjointed configurations. 
Puzzle pieces that don't quite fit right.
My flags are tattered and torn 
black, and ghostlike
barely strung together
and hanging from mangled masts. 
On the bow is a twisted  Stygian crow 
holding an ancient quill pen 
bleeding obsidian black ink into the ocean
surrounding my boat
Turning the water as black as the death I cause
The air surrounding my ship is an icy cold blue air
almost too thin and cold to breath.

I am Cap'n Ghost Lee Waters.
long black tangled beard
hollow sunken eyes rimmed with aching death. 
I move in frozen desecrations and icy darkness
I move towards you with murderous intent
And soon you will be within my grip
And you will feed my ship.

You're in my arms with your head on my chest and I couldn't think of any way to spend the morning better.
You're hands trace the lines on the palms of my hands and rub my thigh thru my jeans and our lips taste each other like its the first time.
I can smell you even when I'm not breathing and I'm enveloped in these moments with you never wanting the comfort to end.
We watch ****** dams and pick up trucks blow up.
There's guns, prayer, and squirrel brains on the television and we laugh at redneck antics.
My stomach growls and you know the solution to quiet such a beast.
You fight sleep and I fight it just as hard because our time is almost up and I don't want to miss a second of you.
Lets pretend the clock is just a set of irrelevant numbers and lay here all day and be as irresponsible as teenagers.
Lets forget all these other moments for just a second longer until the clock strikes its over and we're back to being adults.

Shoo fly
Don’t bother my wife

             Shoo fly
             Go back outside

                         Shoo fly
                         Leave the inside

                                      Shoo fly
                                      Go out and die

It’s become painfully obvious
That you’re in love with the sound
Of your own voice
Drowning out all those around
You have never had a moment of silence
Always filling the air
With nerve-grinding
“Yeah-yeah-yeah” conversation
And the “he-he-he” of your laughter
I’d staple, sew, and stitch your mouth shut
If I were assured that you wouldn’t find
Some way to talk out of your *******

Her eyes cried graveyard dances when she saw his ghost empty the dilapidated body before her
The ache of loneliness echoed the space in her heart
Causing a well of shivers to convulse thru her fragile worn body
She wasn't sure how much more she could bear
But knew her life meant more now than it had before
Touched by a love so vast It circled the galaxies and haloed everything it caressed
She had no choice but to breathe in and fight the overwhelming desire of depression
Struggling to pull her under
She would make it thru
Scarred beyond physical flesh and tortured with every waking second and with every nightmarish dream
But she would continue on
Never giving up or giving in
Never letting the cavernous beast deep down inside her win.

There's an emptiness inside of me
That I've been doing my best to avoid

Words used to fill the hollow spot
As deeply as the humans I once knew
But slowly they all slipped out
And left a bottomless well
That burns like rotgut whiskey and ulcers

There's an emptiness inside of me
That I choose to ignore

I take my mind off of it with small adventures,
Afternoon beers,
Late night cocktails,
Early morning ****** Mary's
And whatever semblance of interaction I can procure.

There's an emptiness inside of me
That I've been trying to ignore

But it has grown vicious teeth
And jagged talons
It tears me apart from the inside out
But you'll never see it on my face
Or hear it in my voice

There's an emptiness inside of me
That I've done what I can to ignore

But the emptiness inside of me is mine
And I'll walk with it to Death's door.

My wife says I spend too much time writing

That I’m always on the computer or cell phone
Scribbling digitally

She says that it’s become and obsession

She says that I spend too much time writing
That it’s all I ever do anymore

She says that writing poetry
Is all I ever think about

I told her

“No, sometimes I think about leaving you,
Now which would you rather me do?”

She flipped me off
And stormed out of the room

Good

Back to writing in peace and quiet

She had been planning it for almost a year. Her skin had felt ***** ever since she felt his touch. She screamed no between tears and pleas for help but no one came and no one stopped him.  She went to the police and anyone she could think that could help her after it happened but she was told it was her fault. That she had been asking for it. That she secretly wanted it and enjoyed it and only got help afterwards out of some guilty conscience on her part. That she was drunk and wearing clothing that revealed too much skin. That it was her fault. Her fault. Her fault. Those words echoed daily in her head, tormenting her insides until she no longer recognized the woman she saw in the mirror every morning.

He was free. Out in the world doing as he pleased. Smiling. Partying. Working. Free.

She remembered carefully peeling off her clothes and putting them in a trash bag that night. She got in the shower and lay in a fetus position, drowning her tears and sobs with the water pouring out of the shower head. It was the last time she cried.

For the first few months she went around to the local haunts she knew she had seen him at before but did not run into him or talk to anyone that knew where he was. She did not know what her intentions were but she knew that she had to find him. To confront him. To resolve the way she felt inside. She was about to give up when one day she saw him walk into the gas station as she was filling up the tank in her car. Her body froze. Her mind raced. She topped off the tank, hung up the pump, and jumped into her car. She idled her engine and watched thru her car's windshield the man buying some beer, cigarettes, a bag of chips; laughing at something the cashier said. He looked the same as he did when she met him but his hair was a little longer and he was clean shaven. She remembered feeling the goatee he wore that night as it roughed against her face as he held her down. She cringed. Her face tightened into a grimace.

She put the car in drive and followed him as he walked out of the station and got into his truck. She maintained a couple car lengths behind him, even allowing other cars to get between her and him but she never lost sight of him. She followed him down the highway, thru neighborhoods, sat outside as he stopped off at three different women's houses; picking each woman up and kissing them as they answered the door and pushed it closed behind him. She followed him home and say outside his house even after he had shut off all the lights.

She did this for months. She watched. She followed. She waited. She learned his schedule and she studied his mannerisms and his movements and the way he carried himself differently around every person he came across. She felt herself coming to know him and know his next move before he made it. She made a plan up in her head.

-----------------------------------

He couldn't complain about a second of his life. His father was wealthy and he grew up privileged, having the best that money could buy, including paying off anybody anytime he came into trouble with any form of authority. He knew he was good looking and knew how to work his charm to get what he wanted from whomever he wanted. He didn't care about anyone but himself tho he told many women that he cared only for them. He always laughed hysterically inside every time he told this lie and they fell for it. His pleasures came first, that was how he lived and he saw no end to it.

He had been ******* his best friends wife when he was at work, telling her that he was a **** and didn't treat her right and that he was getting *** on the side. He wasn't. He knew this. But convinced her otherwise. But he was getting bored with her and felt like moving on. After he was done with his session; as he called them; he told her that her ***** was loose and tired and that he was done ******* a filthy **** like hers. He threatened to tell her husband everything and make her come off as some ***** if she said anything. Claimed that he was just a man taken advantage by a ****. She cried and screamed and threw plates at him and told him to leave and told him to ******* as she collapsed into a mess on the kitchen floor. He smiled and laughed as he walked out of the house, nearly skipping joyfully to his pick-up.

He slid into the drivers seat and pulled out a cigarette from the pack he kept in the glovebox. He lit it and inhaled. He looked into the rear view mirror and saw a pair of icy blue eyes that he had the vague recollection of knowing staring at him. It was the last thing he saw before everything went black.

-----------------------------------

She hid in the rear cab of the truck and waited for him to see her before hitting him in the head with a hammer. Not hard enough to **** him but hard enough to make him blackout. She climbed into the front seat and pushed him aside and drove to an empty storage unit she had purchased under a false name. She parked the truck and dragged his body out of it and into the shed. She clumsily picked him up and propped him to a chair sitting in the center of the unit. She taped him to the chair with duct tape. First taping his hands together behind the backrest, then around his chest until the roll ran out and she grabbed another and taped both his legs to the front legs of the chair. She placed a piece on his face around his mouth, wishing to herself that he still had his goatee so she could rip it off when she removed the tape.

She splashed water on him to wake him up. His eyes burst open in fear and he struggled and mumbled but could not break free. In front of him she had sat a camera up. It focused on him. It was recording.

She stood in the shadows behind the camera with only her face exposed. She could feel him burning his stare into her and searching his memories for her face. She knew he found it when his eyes widened and tears began to form at the corners. He mumbled something thru the tape. She pulled down a black ski-mask over her face and walked into the cameras frame. She peeled away the tape.

He sobbed he was sorry. That he never meant to do it and that he felt bad about it everyday. He told her he had money and would give it all to her if she'd let him go. He begged. He pleaded. She knelt down and looked him in the eyes and whispered in his ear to confess to the camera and she would let him go. He started to scream. She smacked him hard across the face and put another piece of tape across his mouth.

He rocked about in his chair trying to set himself free but soon realized that he could not free himself. He cried some more and looked at the woman who once again stood behind the camera. He stared at her and into her and finally resigned himself to what she asked for. He nodded his head and she walked out from behind the camera and stripped away the tape.

He confessed to ****** her and six other women. He confessed to touching his niece who was only ten years old inappropriately and denying it to her parents when they confronted him, saying she had an active imagination and they should get her help. He admitted to paying off judges and cops and eyewitnesses anytime he found himself in trouble.

He admitted to many things that made her skin crawl. All she wanted was a confession of his assault against her but he kept going on, rambling thru tears and pleas and more tears. Finally he was quiet. She asked if that was all. He stared at her with glossy eyes and shook his head yes. She looked closely at the man in front of her, disgusted to depths she did not know existed. She walked towards him and replaced the tape on his face. He again attempted to struggle to no avail. She walked out of the storage shed and to his pick-up and grabbed the five gallon bucket of gasoline he kept in the back of the bed. She walked back into the shed and closed the door again.

His eyes widened in terror. She confessed to him that she was going to let him go after he admitted what he did but after hearing everything she had decided that she could not. That it made her sick to think about him walking the streets or even rotting in prison. She couldn't trust any system that kept letting him and people like him off. She poured the gasoline on him, even removing the tape and forcing him to swallow some so that it sat heavy in his stomach. She replace the tape for the last time and looked at him. Looked into him. She felt fear leaving her body. She felt pain leaving her body. She felt an overwhelming sense of peace wash over her and she smiled and laughed for what felt like the first time in her life.

She walked out of the camera frame and turned around. He sat in the middle of the room, tape to a chair and covered in gasoline. The camera was recording. She lit a single match and then a book of matches and threw them towards him. She watched as the flames engulfed him slowly at first and he squirmed in his chair and the flames worked their way up his body quicker and quicker and she could hear his muffled screams and see him struggling but still securely bound to the chair. Everything aflame. The camera still recording.

She pressed stop a few moments after she saw his head fall forward and his body stopped moving. She watched the flames a few more moments eat away at the man that ate away at her. She took the video out of the recorder and put it in a plastic case and sat it outside of the storage shed. She closed the door and walked off into the distance, smiling and enjoying her life and the fresh air.

The wind howled outside of the lean to and Brian knew that it was only a matter of time before the chill settled in and the last breath of life would leave his body. He thought about his family back in the city and he could not bring to mind any bad times tho he knew that there were many. He thought of his marriage and how beautiful his wife had looked on her wedding day walking down the aisle escorted by her grandfather who had a tear in his eye. He remembered the way her dress and her hair flowed behind her as if there were some slight breeze that had hit her at just the right angle to make it possible. He remembered trying not to cry and to only smile the closer she got to him and how he nearly lost his composure when her grandfather handed her off to him. Brian thought of their first born who he called Maggie but  was named Magnolia by both parents and his wife still used that name. She would be turning sixteen this year and he had not been around as much lately as he had liked but he felt that she knew he would always be there. A tear rolled down the wind bitten cheeks of Brian and began to slow once it got close to his chin, partially leaving a frozen trail from eye to tears end. He thought about Maggie as a little girl, perhaps around the age of five, and the fishing trips that they would take out on the lakes of Minnesota. He remembered the first time that she had baited the fishhook herself and how proud both she and he were when she had caught a ten pound walleye with that same hook. Brian wanted desperately to hold onto that moment for the rest of his life and swore he would never forget and all thruout the years of his life it was one memory that we went back to anytime he felt low and out of place with everyone and everything around him. Brian thought of his two sons, Jameson and Benjamin, twins that could not have been more different. Jameson was great at sports and thrived on competition where Ben was more artistic and would often be found doing volunteer work. Tho they had many differences, they were brothers thru and thru and never had a bad moment together. Brian and Ruth Ann had raised there children right; he knew that much was true and felt the pang of sadness pierce his heart as he felt the anguish of his wife when she heard the news that he was dead and she would have to finish raising them alone. He knew she would do just fine and he wanted to tell her so, to comfort her somehow even tho he wouldn't be around but he had no way of doing so and instead shivered beneath the lean to and continued thinking of his family to keep his mind active. After a short while tho he felt his brain slow and the memories became distant like dreams do after a few moments of being awake. Brian closed his eyes tightly and forced himself to think and focus. He thought about the last family photo that they took and how grown up everyone was becoming and how much love was still in his wife's eyes and he lied down on the cold ground with that image in his head and he slipped into a sleep from which he knew he would not wake up from but still he smiled at his memories and hoped that even without him his children would continue being happy and would grow further and start their own families which would have their own families and so forth. He hoped his wife would be strong and keep on and if she should find someone else he hoped she would not let Brian be the thing that kept her from living. Before Brian exhaled his last breath, he saw Maggie baiting the fish hook and smiling the way a child does. Brian smiled too and slipped into death.

I shake these insecurities and scratch away my skin
Close my eyes and bite deep until I bleed again
I know I'm never too good to remember but you'll never forget
The taste of it still lingers on nights strewn with hearts on fire
I cross my heart and hope to live
It's a disease I'm sure but I'm sick anyway
This passion is violent the way love repents
And darkness closes in on me while I'm in daylight
I can't see but I'm open to your opinion
I can't strand this imagination on ancient shores
They crash to me like ghosts and demons drunk on moonshine
Freedom is another word we made up
But forgot to put meaning behind it
I've stitched myself to so many pieces I'm bound to unravel eventually
Will you sew me back up or have you given up on this jigsaw puzzle
It's been so long I've forgotten the words and what any of them meant
I'm so alone it doesn't matter does it

Would you break your silence
As the tide washes over me?
Lend me your lips for one last kiss
Before I'm thrown into the awaiting abyss
It's become abysmal to walk the surf
Without holding your hand in mine
And the soft pallet of your laughter
Drowning out the music from seashells

It makes what time we have
Feel like a short eternity
But names written in the sand
Have a tendency to wash back out to sea

There's footprints I follow
Will they lead me to the beating in your chest
Or are they where I've already been?
Have I touched the tender ache of your skin
The way I dig my toes into the sand
And feel the ocean caress me like your finger tips
Have I known this all along
Or have I sank to the bottom
Lungs filled with melodies of woeful maladies?

It makes what time we have
Feel like a short eternity
But names written in the sand
Have a tendency to wash back out to sea

When the tide comes in
Would you break your silence
Would you struggle to save me from my fate
Would you cry if you were too late
When the tide comes in
Would you forgive me for not staying

When the tide comes crashing in
There's a tendency to wash back out to sea

It makes what time we have
Feel like a short eternity
But names written in the sand
Have a tendency to wash back out to sea

I'm light years away from you right now
Watching thru a telescope
Barely seeing the small fragment of life you've become to me
I sometimes wonder how our worlds drifted this far apart
When we had such heavy gravity
Pulling us together
But I guess it wasn't enough
Because somewhere along the way
Our orbits began to pull apart
And you started to collect
A ring of asteroids and comets
Hanging around like they were your moons
Stuck in your magnetic pull
You started thinking you were the sun
And everything centered around you
I couldn't be near you after that
So I let the space between us grow and grow
Until we were in different galaxies
And no longer held together
In each others gravity

"Truly you love me?" she whispered beneath the soft sound of his kisses which started near the sharp edge of her hip bones working slowly up, tracing every inch of every slender curve until his mouth met the softness of her neck and the whiskers of his beard tickled her slightly and caused her to tremble and her toes to curl. She smiled and bit lightly on her bottom lip.

"What makes you so sure," he inquired thru a mischievous grin. He could feel the warmth of her skin touching his and in this moment he knew that he loved her and only her deeply but he did not want to say so just yet and played coyly with his lips on the nape of her neck and entangled his fingers in the golden blonde strands of her hair, pulling just enough so that she arched her back and ****** her ******* into the hardness of his chest.

"It's in the way that your mouth moves across me."

"Perhaps my mouth is only hungry?"

"Perhaps. But then how do you explain your hands?"

"They have a mind of their own."

"A wonderful mind it is."

She ached for his mouth to be on hers, to feel the course hairs of his beard on the softness of her cheeks, for the hard lines of his hands to cup her ******* and squeeze her ****, for him to be the only moment she would ever have. She wiggled out beneath his force and in doing so he lay supine with her on top. Her hair was hanging down like a curtain over his face so that all he could see was her icy blue eyes and beautiful red lips. His hands moved across the smooth tan skin of her back until she grabbed his arms and traced them with her hands up to his, ensnared their fingers, and pinned his arms above his head.

"You're my prisoner now."

"You are my warden?"

"I am."

"My crime?"

"So cruel, it is unmentionable."

"I'm innocent. I swear." He said unbelievingly.

"We are all innocent in our own wicked ways."

"You are not innocent."

"No, I am the devil and I've come for your soul," she laughed.

He lunged his face forward to meet her lips but she pulled away, smiling.

"You haven't served your time yet."

Her tongue was tracing the canines of her teeth and there was a growl to her voice that made her seem like a wild beast and this drove him insane on the inside. He feigned struggling to lift his arms up away from her pinning him down but liked that she was on top of him and did so only in play.

"Don't I get time served for being good?"

"Yes. But I don't want you to be good."

"But I am an angel."

"Your halo is held up by horns."

He tired of their banter and raised his arms and flipped her over on to her backside and lay on top of her once more. The sheets on the bed were now completely tangled around their bodies so that they had cocooned themselves and were pressed very tightly together. His mouth met her mouth and they shared a long kiss that awakened both the insides and the outsides of their bodies.

His eyes met hers and her lips smiled and her face creased beautifully.

"Truly, you are the only one I love."

The slow saunter of charcoaled amber courage slithering down my throat, the old familiar burn of a love gone wrong and one too many nights spent staring at the city lights, wishing for that ******* pool of darkness to finally overtake the senses. It never happens. This place may as well be a brilliant hell-bent flame never dying out. Some broken swing jazz plays in the background, left over from an alternate time-line where life never progressed from the fall of the roaring twenties. A depressing state of depression, lost in gloom. Smoke hangs in the air like meat at the butcher shop, thick and over-powering, the somber stench of stale Camels, American Spirits, and matches burning down to the tip. Even the cool night air filled with the falling rain does nothing to move this smoke or smell away from the nostrils or eyes. It’s getting late but still the lights shine, the eyes burn, and the whiskey continues to be pored and drunk. A phone rings somewhere in the distant room, I barely make it in time before the last ring. I shouldn't have picked up. Not on a night like this...

My heart is breaking as I hear of her footsteps lightly walking away from the door, knowing the end of her walk was not much farther down the line. It’s too late to save her. A cop tapes off the scene of the ******, rain drenched and keeping reporters at bay, miserable in his line of work. But a man must earn a living in these modern times. A man must earn a living in these modern times. Her lifeless corpse lays uncomfortably on the floor, traced in chalk, with her scantly clad black dress slightly as-cued of her earthly surrogate, she looks like an angel of broken memories. Blood from her wrists and a suicide note that just doesn't seem right. The bruising on her neck looks fresh. Too fresh to be from any day or time but the present. Heavy boot prints lead on the concrete towards the streets, washing away in mud and continuing downpour. The world is on fire as the flame in my heart dies out knowing what must be done...

I sit lonely at my desk, scarred by broken glass and endless wars, sifting thru notes of tragedy that all blend into one bad noir movie repeating some forgotten enchanted quote about life and death and everything not meant to happen in between. It is what it is. It’s always what it shouldn't be. She wasn't old, just shy of some milestone birthday, but she lived hard I'm told by the few that knew her...

There's a barely audible knock on the door, heard only by the quite constant repetition of flesh meeting hardwood. I stand to open the door but before I can pull myself together to walk the some odd number of feet towards it, the door slowly opens and in steps someone I knew from a past life. There is not enough whiskey left in my glass for this encounter to be of any good...

"Tell me something that no one else knows darling" she crooned to me as I ran my fingers thru strands of her golden blonde hair before grabbing it and wrapping a fist full of strands around my hands and pulling tightly, moving in for a rough kiss on her soft lips. She bit my lip and drew blood. I bit hers and she yelped as if she had had a small ******. Her body became weak beneath my touch.

"You've ruined me for the rest of my life."

"I said to tell me something no one knew, not something that is dreadfully obvious to even the town drunkard."

"I am the town drunkard."

"City drunkard."

"State drunkard."

"Earth drunkard."

"THE drunkard," I roared and pulled her closer to me, feeling the ache of her skin as it collided into mine. Her breathing was heavy. Rapturous. She smelled of lust and passion that only comes in the moment of being caught doing a thing that should not be done. I inhaled her. I wanted to destroy her so that no one else could ever know her the way I do.

"You're mine."

"Oh am I now?"

"Yes. Now."

"Well then. Own me."

"I don't want to own you."

"Oh? What is it you want then," she asked with a slight tremble in her voice.

"I want to break you as you've broken me."

"What if I am already broken?"

"Then I will take you."

"Take me."

The rain falls down heavily outside of the house except for eleven leaks coming first from the roof into the attic crawl space. Some of the rain splattering on support beams and flying in multiple directions and some of it dropping straight down onto the ceiling below until it weakened the structure and began dripping down into the kitchen and living room into a collection of pots, buckets, and a waterproof hiking boot. The other boot sat dry on a shoe rack.

Richard Davis sat in his living room across from a table drinking a whisky and mineral water. On the table was a failing play of solitaire. The cards that Richard needed to win was the Three of clubs and the Ace of ***** both of which were lying face down in the seventh column at the top two spots. He had no moves available with any of the other cards to get to them. Richard Davis sighed and picked up all the cards after taking a drink from his glass and shuffled the deck three times before laying them out for another round.

Davis was playing to **** the time until the morning world would catch up with him and he could leave the house out into the rain and go down to the docks and on the boats to catch some fish.

He had attempted sleeping earlier in the night but found that he could not rest for longer than a couple minutes at which time he was not truly at rest if he were honest and his head wrestled with all of the thoughts that ran thru it and he was in the light of the full moon before the rain clouds came in and obscured it behind their thick black and grey hues. He was not superstitious but still could not sleep and he wondered if sleeping in the full moon did induce nightmares or if it only did at sea.

After a few hours of attempting and failing at sleep, he got up and checked his nap sack and tackle box and rod and fixed himself a whisky and mineral water using a bottle of  Johnnie Walker Blue Label and a bottle of Perrier. He grabbed his drink and grabbed a deck of cards lying on the counter and walked into the living room and sat down and shuffled his cards before laying them out for a game of Canfield and drank his drink.

When the leaks started to appear from the ceiling he finished off his drink and stood up and walked around the house grabbing six pots and two deep pans and two buckets and placed them each beneath a leak before seeing one last leak at which moment he grabbed the hiking boot and put it beneath the stream. He laughed and made himself another drink this time adding less mineral water to the mix and sat back down and continued his game of solitaire.

The sun began to show outside in the eastern skies right near the drop off of the ocean and its rays slowly filtered thru the little city and across the hills and thru the rain into the window seeping thru the tattered blinds of the house. Richard Davis smiled at feeling the sun on his face and finished loosing at his game and finished off his drink, rolling the lasts bit of taste around in his mouth before swallowing. Davis stood up and grabbed his gear and opened the front door; sat his sack, box, and rod on the ground and locked the door and picked them back up, adjusting the weight as needed and went out into the rain and down to the docks for work.