It’s not just on sunny days that I thank the saltwaters for washing you ashore. But it was sunny that day I was walking barefoot on the beach, thinking it all looks the same.

Sun. Sand. Sky. Sea.

But then,
I saw you.

It could have been anyone else. Do you realize how much you look like the rest from afar? But in my eyes, the light seemed to only bounce off you. I could have walked on, but for some reason I stopped. And I’m glad I did stop. Long enough to pick you up, long enough to feel every rise and every fall, long enough to run my fingers over all the places sand somehow found its way into, all the edges, sharp and rough, that sometimes hurt the hands that hold you, and you sometimes hurt me but

Don’t wish to be washed away just because you have.

I know you wonder why on earth you’re still ashore. I know you love the sun, but sometimes its rays cast too much shadows that whisper darkened daydreams of blue embraces, and you’ve tried resting in its arms once or twice. I know you get tired of the ocean and how the waters break against your back day after day, but know that each time they do, a piece of your past chips off. A bit of weakness is made strong. The ocean is shaping you and it isn’t done with you just yet.

Don’t forget this.

I hope that you don’t see yourself as leftovers. Who hasn’t had someone leave them before? You are more than something that was left behind. You are not its ghost. There is beauty in the way you’ve kept your shell, in the way you still hold against the currents, in the way you refuse to let wind and weather steal your colors. But maybe you don’t know it. Or maybe you’ve been waiting for another pair of eyes and hands to see it for you.

But I see it. I do. I’m not the perfect pair of eyes and hands, but I hope you’ll let me help you make it through.

There are still so many sunny days we’ve yet to walk in.

Pirates from the sunken ship making it ashore on a dilapidated raft landed on the shoe of a reef that was home to a scurvy knave who’d once been master engineer to the Royal Navy until *** took over his thinking and he began to concoct schemes to overthrow the Crown.
Dismissed as an insane crackpot he’d been set adrift by his shipmates; coming upon the aerated cluster of marine life that was chock full of unusual and bizarre aquatic creatures and minerals; now dwelling this long among the coral creating living machines from the articulated pincers and shells of all but unknown gigantic crustaceans living on and around the reef.
Bringing liquor made them more than welcome as some of the pirates had survived clinging to a chestful of buoyant ***. The old Navy man running from his coral-thatched hut. Seeing the chest first of all he finessed the lock with a sharp fingernail tossing the chest open and guzzling down a bottle. “Ay man!” cried Captain Quick.
“I saw ‘em bring ya down,” the old mad man croaked.
“Was it a rocket?” asked the brawny woman coming up from the beach.
“Who the hell knows,” said the beachcomber.
The fierce and ***** Lizzie Quick had two gold teeth in front, one incisor on the right and one opposite front tooth outlined in gold. Her back teeth were ALL gold. So she was never without bandelier and pistols even when she slept, or ***** knaves would try to pry the gold right out of her head but now she carried a long knife at her side and a shorter rapier in her ruined kneehigh embroidered Spanish leather condorosa boots. Her red satin corset was embroidered with gold silk and her soaked hoop skirt were red and purple just because they could be. Normally light on her feet, soaked to the skin she felt as if she were wearing lead bloomers. Calling her serving ***** Esmeralda from the sand, the woman began arduously removing her mistress’ clothing layer by layer. The scavenging hermit helping himself to another bottle of ***.
“Ay man, I say, where we be?” tried Quick once again.
“You be on Wild Island, my island and ya best get off it. There’s no room for ya.”
“Ay man, you say you saw what happened out there did ya?”
“Sure did. That hole opened up and blew a **** I could smell from here. Couldn’t get away from it if I tried but it sent a blast of black **** through the air like a jet.”
“Like a what?” said the pirate.
“It’s a kind of rocket, short for ‘jettison’. I can do the same thing with a lobster. Launch it near into space.” Quick was convinced the isolated kook was completely out of his mind. The ruddy tattooed woman stripping completely naked with no inhibitions, her equally inked dark-skinned servant dutifully peeling the wet garments from the darkly freckled body.
Quick picking up a bottle drank it down and tossed it to the sand.
“Say, matey, this ain’t your home. Don’t be discardin’ your waste on me property.”
“Who be you old man?” said the stinking pirate even after a bath.
“They call me Savage but that’s just me name. I was somebody once, an engineer in the King’s Royal Navy. I put ships on the water. Built me own right here on this here island. But I ain’t got nowhere to go.”
“You say you have a ship?” said the Quicks together.
“Say old man, how would you like some choice *****?” broached Esmeralda.
The old man squinted, “What’s that matey? Pushups? I don’t do push-ups.”
“Cooch, me hardy. Me woman’s woman’s offering you some ******. Have at it eh?”
The old man sat down in the sand to think it over.
“I haven’t had a wooden leg on many a yarn. Are they still usin’ ‘em the same way?”
“Nothin’s changed a bit, my friend. That ship out there, it’s full of women, me hardy.”
The old man’s eyes finally widened brightly as he peered from beneath his shade hand. The Green Belle out at sea gliding smoothly across the waters her wake clear as crystal.
“There be women on that thar ship?” said the sailor. “I be needing a wife.”
“Then it’s settled. You help us take that ship and you’ll get the pick of the litter.”
“Deal!” said the lonely codger wagging the pirate’s hooked paw.
“Now how about that thar ship of yours?”
“It’s a mechanical ship. Does your band know anything about machinery? Moving parts and such?” queried the stranded relic.
“I can rig a mean mast, matey. Me whole crew’s expert at workin’ a ship no matter what size.”
“I don’t **** care about that, matey. My ship goes under the water.”
“It sinks?”
“No, *******. It moves under the water like a fish.”
Quick scrubbed his jaw and pondered, turning to his first mate.
“Mister Lance, can you make anything out of what he’s saying?”
“He seems to have a moving...er...no, sir. I haven’t a clue.”
“Okay, old man, you win!” shouted the pirate queen herself, dragging the man by the feet into the hut. He was fine with it because he was drunk and his limbs like rubber. She was done shortly, returning to the crew on the beach. “He’ll be needing a rest. In the meantime why don’t we think up a plan?”

Her husbands’ death had come upon him quick.
He’d always been so full of life and song.
She’d had no warning that her Tom was sick.
until he crumpled to the sidewalk and was gone.

The very day they put her husband in the ground,
a Jet black Lab with no collar or license
that she took to calling “Pepper” came around.
“He must belong to someone.” was her sense.

She put up signs and Ads and asked around.
She made inquiries to find the owner of the Lab.
No one in town had seen the dog before
the day they placed her man beneath the sod.

Pepper stayed faithfully at his mistress’ side
They took long walks down Beachcomber Way
Only Pepper heard the tears she cried
and stayed by her till the sadness passed away

Three winters they passed in that little town,
a town that made its living from the sea.
Eventually she felt strong enough to work
and re acclimate to life and company

As Spring’s warmth dissipates the winter gloom,
Sadness cannot forever shadow hearts
The heart is a perennial and so will bloom
as soon as the snows of sorrow will depart.

Then, on the anniversary of the date
the day they placed her husband in the ground,
She called and called but Pepper didn’t come-
The Jet black Lab was nowhere to be found.

She put up signs and Ads and asked around.
She made inquiries to find her dog again.
but no one ever saw the Lab in town.
The stray will go where he is taken in.

Precious chance for a lonely thought,
Loose, slip-fades sinuously free
A melodious stream of nostalgic mist
From a mug of Arabica sea.

Curiously exhaled from dissonance
In an amber lit café.
He imagines himself a sojourner,
A wayfarer without a way.

Long shore drift en echelon
Long minutes march by metronome
Long is the spellbound beachcomber
For an island all his own.

Long is the dream of an inland man
Lost to his seaside girl.
Diver down where the standard waves
Swimming dizzy for a polished pearl.

Light from her eyes plays on sea glass chips
Tumbled in the curling waves
That crest and break on a beach that waits
for a wish he once had made.

The surf is heard like a lingering kiss
breathing ripples on the smoothening sand
And just as the whisper and simmering fades,
Another promise swells, tumbles, and lands.

The ocean is love running breathless,
In a race between the moon and the sun,
Causing tides to surge across the poignant curve
Of an incandescent blue horizon.

A tranquil star contracts and bursts
In pulsing neon spires.
There’s forever a star expiring
While life glows from embers in a dying fire.

If this writer could paint, it would be a portrait
of the empty space beside him.
Awaiting the image of a seagoing girl,
He turns his canvas into a thirsting ocean.

soft shell turtle,
sandy smooth with detail, patterns cover and decorate you.
your subtle gaze,
is a comfortable impression,
it reflects a dull light...
barely there, but visible...
to a beachcomber's vigil who sees,
soft shell turtle crawling,
straining for a place out of shadow,
slowly moving forward,
to reach a sunlit resting place.

broken lines of tragic poetry
spread *****-nilly across the imitation hard-wood flooring
polyurethane broad leaf maple
complete with swirls and lines
as if it were somehow damaged in a lightning storm and forced to grow
twisted and bent
I stare into the abyss of half-written sentences
and six rhyme sets
bent, rent, dent, cent, divergent, spent
home, gnome (Alaska or little dwarf), poem, loam, roam, beachcomber
draft, raft, laughed, giraffe, bath, Taft (little town near Lincoln City)
and so on and so on and so on
til death –
grasping at passing visions and mental images
attempting to reconcile this pile into worthwhile stylings
and filing them alphabetically …

there I did it accidentally….
as if to prove the point on my head
has a friend.

Revolving floor of soreness
my pores ooze from unrest
able to fully digest
what I peruse and use for
my next ‘write’ fest
something about ****** and recess…
and the best dressed in the west
confessing diabetes….
I digress
and pretend this never happened –

a prisoner of birth
the beachcomber
an a red rabbit
conversing in the place of lightness
spoke of the point of origon
then, shared the deception on his mind
in a painted house
until memories of midnight
became monday mourning
and the warlock
cried it's over now
let's bake ginger breads

I can hear the noise of the world, always
In my ears, like the sea never leaves the shell,
No matter how far travelled by a beachcomber
Who takes their souvenir home.
No matter how far I roam, the world follows up
It’s chaotic tone, voices shouting, ringing phones,
Cars with car horns rushing to be late
Somewhere they really don’t want to go.
Fools, vagabonds, gypsies, businessmen, wives
Police and thieves, cannot escape the gravitational
Drag of the world on their destiny.
I can hear the swish of their existence in my sleep
It never leaves me, like the restless tide it creeps.

Which of us will be the last to recall
The cold colors of ***** splashing
Through the dunes on breezes
Lit by twilight ends of summer hours
Burning still the sands  
The rasping grass chorus
Laid silent, together, under the skies of our youth

Which of us will call out the scream of
That screen door, banging  
More frequently than the distant crashes of surf
Nerves tensed as dry and brittle
As those great grasses, ceaseless through day and through
night

We never thought about such things  
Before the years called back to us  
As mocking as the gulls'
Insistent bravado  
Laughter turned to tears
To swoop away
Empty

I fold my shadow,
pack it purposely
for transition through  
districts that nightly invariably
abort me on
salty frigid sand mornings
that never smelled night
and night that
never ends.

I first sought the companionship of words
to dream love into shapes I could touch.
The world had become distorted and distant; writing resurrected a need to feel, to chip away at callouses, embrace my soft again. Poetry felt forbidden, decadent, enticing- a trove of pleasurable pain.  Words wrapped around rhythmic  lines framing stories where my wanderlust could journey: beyond the broken fence of normalcy, past the lamppost, to utter obscurity.  

Now, I sleep beneath the exposure of stars, writing the dark, unsettled histories within, territories where only my fingers can navigate their distance. Out in this unknown, I forget my name. I am the faceless gravedigger of my soul, scavenger of lost relics, beachcomber in love with the sea's unbridled fury.

As I walk the morning beach alone,
with sunlight on my face,
I search to find these treasured bits
in this, a magical place.

These gifts the seas give endlessly,
are tossed before my hands,
all wet with the foamy surf-brought brine,
they glisten in the sand.

A dwelling once for housing life,
discarded now they find,
a special place within the one,
with solitude of mind.

This quiet life of beachcombers,
we know it all too well,
need silence, peace, and beauty,
as we search for more than shells.

Silvers of rock, carpet secrets lost to time.
Knowledge cocooned in a blanket of sand.
Civilisations sleep soundly beneath the waves.
All this, whilst you drift on by.