I lay spread out on 
My local shingle beach
Letting the pebbles 
Sift through my fingers
I consider the myriad
Shapes and forms they take.
The varying rust
Charcoal grey and mustard shades

I set myself a mission
In the multitudes
That the sea brings to my feet
I will find amongst the 
Copious cobbles
The ultimate pebble
Perfect and pleasingly
Quirky or smooth.

I become so absorbed by 
This sifting sorting 
Comforting process 
A simple quest
I forget myself
And my proximity to the waves 
Until i am splashed 
And soaked and 
Have to vow to take up
This valiant quest 
Another day.

Until then I have taken 
Home a few shortlisted
Candidates
And made a promise to stand up when
The winner is found
And make a little trumpet
Fanfare sound
And hold the stone aloft!

You are the waves crashing into the shore,
And I am the pebbles you hit.
Crash into me,
I wanna be drowning in the sea.
Fill my lungs,
Pull me under twelve feet deep.
Sway with me,
You are my sweet pea.
You're just like the ocean,
Difficult to ignore.
But if i had a choice,
I'd still drown, for sure.

She comes each day
to comb the beach
for words beneath the waves.

Tongue crests roll curled
syllables to shore

The salt wind catches
breath and sighs

claws the chords
and clamour of the stones

reckless tide scratches
sentences of sand

splintering into time
particles and meaning

tidal drag snatches
back surface similes

slips back to blue
and thunders timpani

drifts back to reflected light
smooth land and water.

© M.L.Emmett

Everyone has a little pond in their mind
And here I got some pebbles to throw into the water

The rocks bounce around the rocky floor
making ripples that I didn’t mean to make
But I still have a mission to stare into that verbal chaos
And become a creator of meanings

So when I spit out these pebbles, don’t be upset
you can cover your ears and let me pass
But a poet is someone who gathers something out of nothing
So please, let me be a poet.

And when the people with the giant skies came to visit
and when they saw my sky was only the size of a pebble,
they ripped it from my hands and swore it was big enough
to drown a few hundreds.
And when I tried to reach for other skies, they warned me
I should count my steps, turn back, try to find other ways
to protect myself from fallen meteorites that want to get
back to space.
I remind myself everyday I have a billion pebbles under my
skin and they’re waiting to be stolen from people with giant skies.
Little bombs that count down for the right moment to explode.