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Kristina Weeks Aug 2018
I’m spiraling and sprawling out
The ugly parts revealed
Like a hermit crab
who’s had his shell taken

Hyperventilating and staring at opaque ceilings listening to the walls
They speak and when they do they whisper of me
They laugh at their corners and close in on me

They grip with brick hands
Face the floor
He feels what I feel
I will merge with him so they will be right
Let them walk all over me
Until I can no longer feel
Joe Cottonwood Jun 2017
In the swash zone
a desperate crab somehow overturned,
belly-up. Dome-backed, helpless,
she twitches feet and claws
grasping only air
as seagulls gather, smacking lips.

Shall I intervene?
Who do I favor, crab or gull?
Frankly I have problems with both personalities.

Can’t ignore a creature in distress.
(Who programmed that?)
Wiggle my toes into damp sand beneath the beast.
Flip.
With nary an acknowledgement, crab scuttles
sideways to a spot in the wave wash
where in a flutter of little legs she half-buries herself,
eyeballs above.
Seagulls scream curses.

What did I expect, a thank you?
First published in *Your Daily Poem*
Gabriel burnS Apr 2017
Cooking beneath the shell
The meat of my thoughts
Like a hermit crab
The boiling of my dreams
Escaping as high-pressure steam
Through tiny fissures
In dye-shifting armor

I never opened up
I never bent or broke
and never cracked
But now is never
All I have, I’m giving back

Plug your ears
To the deafening screams
That no amount of heating
Can make edible
You are the hardness of my shell
Omnipresent and Incredible
I wanted to post this earlier, at the time of writing but I guess it had to ferment a bit.
Angela Bridgman Jun 2016
As a hermit crab does she dwell
Safe within a borrowed shell
Here she lives in fear
Of the outside world
She feels so near

She exists here all alone
Only home she's ever known
Fearing what she'll find
Danger lies ahead
Safety left behind

No longer confined, free at last
All her doubts now in the past
Free now to explore
All the places
She feared before
Written at age 31, one week after returning from my gender reassignment surgery in Bangkok, Thailand
Erin Atkinson Dec 2015
somedays, Love is like an empty driveway. sometimes Love is a grizzly; when it wakes, it growls at you. sometimes, Love is a full moon. Love dances with You and forgets its claws and gnashing teeth. sometimes, Love doesn't know that its bites aren't supposed to hurt. but sometimes You don't either, so you forgive. sometimes Love is a cat that scratches and comes back purring. You don't fault it for being that way. Love is not easy to understand, but at least You are always willing to try.
Ron Sparks Jul 2015
his frail form
offers a salted tribute
to the warriors lying
dead and dying on and under
his geta.  A thousand
clacking sounds rise up
into the stormy seas as
these tiny samurai know
defeat once
again.
The Samurai Ghost *****, or heike crab, was used by Carl Sagan in Cosmos to illustrate evolution and survival of the fittest.  The battle of Dan-no-ura immortalized in the Tale of Heike was a pivotal moment in Japan’s history, which established the first military dictatorship and resulted in the death of a child emperor.
PrttyBrd Apr 2015
Hues of blue and gray
With a succulent sweetness
That begs to be savored
In the briny waters off the sea
They lead a life unseen
Scavengers in warm water
A lazy afternoon
Wire mesh and day old fish
Chicken necks on a string
Baited traps dropped in left in wait
Edgewater shallows and a lot of time
One by one they come
Chasing that string to the shore
One by one they come
Pull up the trap and catch what you can
Fill the bucket with sweetness
There is nothing quite like
A blue crab Saturday afternoon
42515
fiachra breac Jan 2015
We sat on that old pier,
as the others crab-fished by.
I found my hands beneath me,
in an attempt to keep them dry.

I traced the outline of a mountain range
with my tired, tearful eyes,
and the sun pinned me to the concrete wall,
stripping me of any disguise.

The fresh wounds on my shoulder
still oozed their precious blood,
yet we talked of days still to come
and summers, oh so far ahead.

Yet for a moment I almost believed that
what I’d done had been undone
but you struck me with reality
and my walls came tumbling down.

We looked at each other,
in the wild, unsettling sun,
with the sea-surf sparkling blue
and voices of our distant friends

ringing of the new
and interesting discovery that one crab, no, two,
had broken through the green net -
maybe that was you.
cait-cait Dec 2014
i remember that day
when the sun was so bright
and the sky was so blue,
and i remember how
we spent that day at the beach,
catching sand *****
and naming them
funny things, and i remember
saying that we could
have them in replace of
children;

its really too bad i cant
even cry now, for
my tears would just
remind me of that day,
since tears are salty like
the ocean, and my heart still
bangs in my chest
like those ***** did
the walls
of my little green pail.
i finished a trilogy that inspired this, since the main character basically became a pirate with her love interest. it was good,
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