Bluetooth + Money

I am struggling to connect a device via bluetooth. This feels like a moment when I’m becoming my parents. The devices are so simple and the instructions are so straight forward that I cannot believe I cannot get the device to connect.

1. Plug in device 1

2. Push the only button on device 1

3. Turn on device 2

4. Push the one of 4 buttons on device 2

5. Everything is blinking quickly blinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblink

That’s where it ends, me sitting on the ground, my head on the leg of my desk, watching a strobe rave of two devices trying to talk to each other and never synchronizing. Disconnected. I reached out to their support email. The reply I received was maybe even more disconnected compared to the in-depth email I sent explaining my issue.

Hi,

x mode is not supported. You can connect to Windows only in D mode.

Step 2a. Put device 2 in D mode. I had taken that step earlier so forgot to list it.

I’ve been thinking a lot about who I surround myself with, trying to build more of a creative group. I don’t have many friends who I would call creators or artists. There’s a big part of my practice that lacks because of a lack of community. Maybe take another class maybe go to another reading. The instructions here are much less clear but I think undeniably great writers crossed paths and overlapped with one another. There’s some sort of rising tide raising all ships shit going on when it comes to writers. I’m embarking later this week on a rafting trip, ten of the fourteen people going are strangers, maybe those waters will bring connections.

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C18 is a bill in Canada that would force social media companies to pay a tax when news stories, from publications, were shared on their platform. In response Meta/Facebook has removed all news from their platform and will not show links shared from news sources. When faced with a similar measure in Australia, with a similar action taken on their part, the hospital system was sent into chaos, likely costing lives, because they could not receive updates in real time as to how a crisis was unfolding.

Money is at the center of all things, which is disheartening obviously.

Tuck ourselves up with a giant ten-thousand dollar bill
our face buried in the pillow stuff in golden down
silk draped from our ankles to wrists
your teeth are diamonds and I cannot hear you breathe
nighttime settles firmly around us
refusing to get up again to any sounds outside
in the kitchen the vase sheds gold dust on the counter
the mirror in the bathroom platinum reflecting the moon
our marble locks on the door sealed tight elegance
there is no warmth in luxury, nothing stores heat
eternal and cold and stolen again and again
between generations from person to person to awe at
we hold hands before the sunrises, our pearl nails click on one another
the sun rolls slowly down the skylights
there are patches to be painted
the wood dresser scuffed and dinged
your eyes are back, looking at me from beneath the comforter
the heat of the day is building and we can smell the dew again

Acceptance + Dust

I received a poetry acceptance yesterday! Obviously very excited, it feels like some amount of the writing muscle I’ve been building has paid off. It’s also in a great lil digital mag that I’ve fallen in love with called miniMAG. I don’t want to bask in the feeling of success for too long. Kat made a comment a while back that I come back too, she said she often can’t see a huge difference in the “first version” (it isn’t usually the first first version) of a poem I show her and the version I show her after I spend time editing. If she read the first version or the edited version of them could have been the first draft. The draft number doesn’t really matter. I think that probably comes down to trusting myself and the work I’m creating. Also recognizing that I know how to write. The poem that was accepted I only put through two rounds of revision. Other poems I’ve worked for over a year through I don’t know how many rounds and they can’t find a home. I guess ultimately when it hits it hits and that’s it. What’s important is to keep at it and try to trust.

△ △ △ △ △

Everything is always getting dusty in our old dusty house. In some way the dust feels fitting for a home as old as ours. I find it hard to imagine a new home, no crooked corners or worn floors, being dusty. Surely they must get dusty but from where does their dust come from? Perhaps it is us who make the dust that settles onto the edges of desks and across the bases of floor lamps. Maybe there is part of us, an older part dragging behind, that brings with it dust as we move through our houses. With ever sweep of a rag or puff gust of air we blow away and forget what is no longer needed. Even we can’t recall what we needed dust for. Maybe the dust in the house is a sign we’re shedding away those old things we carried. Maybe dust shows that we’re growing. Maybe dust is not a sign of neglect or lazy housekeeping but that the inhabitants of the home are becoming grown in some new way and that is what is more important.

Trees + Flutter

Last winter, half a tree came down from the weight of snow. Half of a whole, that once provided shade relief. The tree forked five feet up from the ground and the gentleman who came to cut it apart told us it had been growing bark on bark from the fork. There was no connectedness between the two halves. They simple grew up on their own from a base well below the surface. The gentleman, then covered in saw dust, also told me the half still standing shouldn’t have any problem carrying on, they weren’t connected after all. That was at the end of winter and now it’s the middle of June. Flowered gardens are in bloom, the sky is a summer blue that makes time irrelevant, and the half of the tree that is standing is covered in brown leaves. The soft breeze rocks the trunk in unsteady ways. I’m faced with a choice, to let the tree stand or perform a mercy killing and take the grand four story tree to the ground. What loneliness does a tree feel without its second half? The inability to cope with losing what was barely connected to begin with. The justification to want to want to die in the face of missing just a sliver of what made you whole. Even without that small piece you are never the same, you are fractured, an incomplete vision of what once was an unable to move away from the gap that is left.

◾️ ◾️ ◾️ ◾️ ◾️

flutter

the morning air calls you sweetly
by a name only the air knows
to the place in the lawn
where the grass is still cool
and the air promises summer
promises wonder
promises calm
promises

Submission + Aliens

So blogs are super annoying. This blog gives me this “can you explain this gap in your resume??” type feel. It’s been weeks since I’ve updated but it hasn’t been for lack of craft, which is great. After poetry month I set a goal for myself of submitting 50 different places by August. The current count is 6/50 and Rejections = 1 Acceptance = 0.

I’ve been trying to carve out more reading time as well, I just finished in the city which I loved you by Li-Young Lee which was honestly very heavy at the start, the first third or half of the collection felt like carrying moving boxes up a flight of stairs in an old apartment building but the last half was very tender and honest. It was a book that took me effort to read and embrace and I felt better for it. I’m almost finished with Tsim Tsum by Sabrina Orah Mark which is easily living on my bookshelf forever. It’s a collection that in the first page I knew I was going to love and draw back to and inspires me with the patterns of the words and the redundant imagery like a flash bulb that you know is familiar but every time it pops keeps causing your eyes to blink and see everything new again with little spots floating around. These aren’t well thought out book reviews but my to read pile is growing so I need to put a dent in it.

Ultimately I’m here, I’m a writer, I’m writing, there’s poems coming out of me onto the (unpublished) page even if Brain Dumpster here has a lapse.

⭘ ⭘ ⭘ ⭘ ⭘

I just have one other big thought floating around in my head right now. I attended the McMinnville UFO festival which is a weekend worthy of its own essay but one speaker brought up a point that is sticking with me. Perhaps, the powers that be do not provide us disclosure because should we, the public, recognize that there are aliens living among us or visiting our planet from other places in the universe we would drop our nationalist ties. We would no longer be, Americans or Chinese or Russians but we would perhaps see ourselves as a species, as humanity compared to the rest of the world. I really like that idea, well not the part about the powers that be instilling nationalism to divide and control the masses, but that we are a species, the human race, and what’s stopping us from viewing ourselves that way is only a prescribed perception. I guess be human is a pretty good way to continue going about my day.

Debreathe + Jackpot

I’ve been working out regularly, three to four times a week, at a strength gym. I know how to deadlift, how to pick up more than I ever thought I could and stand straight backed with it, without flinching. I know how to bench-press, from my back, laid out, and lift the weight over me until I can escape from underneath it. I’ve figured how to trust my muscles. Creatively I’ve been training as well, thirty poems in thirty days, is a lot of weight. By the end I felt almost a madness in how I was approaching writing, like I was a spider armed man reaching into books and ripping out words and pages to lick and stick to the wall. As good as the exercise feels in the moment catching your breath afterwards comes with the full sense of acknowledgement that you are now on the other side of wherever you were. You can exhale, sigh, let the spindle inside of you bring back in all the effort and determination and creative force you exerted, to put them back into the jars inside you so they can grow in the glass like mold until they’re full. The breathing in the moment of working to get a poem out or swing a heavier kettle bell is so necessary, maybe more necessary than the breathes we take just walking around. When you stop that breathing, when you reach the break, knowing full well you are going back into the full swing, and when you catch that breath, that is a feeling to be reveled in.

△ △ △ △ △

(I just really think it is soo funny to use the term “we hit the jackpot” in Las Vegas in any other context than hitting an actual jackpot.)

We sat down willing to lose
and disillusioned to the grandeur available
When the dealer flips the nine of swords
and the crowd behind lets out sighs
Chips have fallen where they may
and Fate’s soft touch only grazed us
Floating on the hopes we had
and someone slips ten dollars in our pockets
Blind confidence is still confidence
and a fool taking chances has a better chance than
The bystanders in the crowd murmuring into coat folds
and fickle Fate has to concede at some point
and introduce us to Destiny

Bambi + Stars

She asks why my job is my job
and like a fish we never bought
I say “job job job job” but
can you help me?
and her head tilts further until
she flops over, belly to the sun
and I see my calling
so I rub rub rub rub but
won’t be paid until later
and she will be bountiful with
kisses, her licks like silk paper
and I follow those trails to my dreams
until morning when her alarm wakes me
telling me I have to pee

⭘ ⭘ ⭘ ⭘ ⭘

Celestial calendars are egregious
how dare they try to plot the
majesty of the universe down
spittled between an X and Y axis
then THEN the audacity of their small minds
ready to be distracted by the next
wonder they box up,
they take the map they have made
of the known universe
and they fold it
Fold it in half and again to fit into a drawer!
Just bending the universe
over itself to be sheltered away
in total darkness.

That drawer
exists for you to find
full of starlight
you must never stop
opening the drawers
to find it

Returning + Snowing

“Don’t cling to anything” - London Writers Hour

A late flight home and an early meeting looming. when I dove into bed last night the covers felt imposed upon. My face planted into the down pillow I bought last month. As I counted breaths the pricks of the feather quills scratched at my face like an animal on alert of a new friend in the home. Soundly enough I dozed until the alarm of my phone pulled me up from my chest by a drawstring I couldn’t see tied around my lungs, pumping them full of air. My legs puppet walked themselves down the stairs, dancing and flailing but never falling. Up into the shower where there is never enough water pressure, which is where I can finally feel at home. No pressure, just the soft fingers of the faucet head strumming my hair.

△ △ △ △ △

Window ledges of old brick
old a drift like a moving box
waiting to be told where to put it
The sun won’t respond and when the sun
does the window ledge will drop
the snow plop down four stories
into a lump on a sidewalk shoveled
three times since before sunrise
The gray white drapes across
the city keep drivers focus small
and slow going
Wet and clung to the sides of trees
when you look out the world blends
into a single white wave
Only the steeples break the pattern
littered across the southside neighborhoods
guide posts to where you dare to go
through the snow
to the people you love tucked behind
the curtains waiting in the cold
to lock eyes and

see colors
share coconut key lime pie
share slices of pie

*little bit of counting downess
*static blanket
*white out
*drapes / curtains / out look vs into the world

Snow + Home

March 25, a Saturday in Wisconsin. 4-6 inches of heavy wet snow. The trees are coated, at the right angle blending themselves into the snow cap roofs behind them. It lacks the stillness of Portland. The world here does not inhale and wait. There is a singular mass exhale and everyone picks up to keep moving. The wind blows. The powder dances through the air as a wish does, trying to find the place to grant its purpose.

Granny + Momentum

I’ve been focused on editing a lot lately and I’ve sent out a few submissions. Granny turns 90 tomorrow and we’re flying back to see her. I can’t wait. Everything in life feels in place right now, the responsibilities, projects, goals, self care, relationships, feel like they are where they should be. Yet like straws in a glass, one wrong move and it all erupts in chaos. I’ve realized I keep so many straws because I need that momentum. I need to be going, that momentum is a challenge. I work against that movement to stay present and to focus. There is something to be said about friction maybe and equal and opposite reactions. Dramatic, but I feel like if I stop I’ll die. I no longer know down time. I simply cannot afford to. Every day is the end of my life. Taste the sunrise, Spring is here in Portland and I am in it. In a season of rebirth I feel the cold hands of eternity shove my back forward, daring me to trip every time I slow down. Forwards I will stumble on one foot then another in front of the other.

Snow + Shovel

Bitter stagnant pointless caked on
covered in sharp surface marks from the rain
remnant of the season change

layered in hard packed snow
caked in hard packed snow
my home beneath it all

there is no hard packed snow on the west coast
we cannot struggle so against the weather

I do not own a shovel
when the snow comes
usually in a wave of a deep down blanket
I lay out in the road my head on the curb
and let the soft white cover me
my mouth open, letting the wave come over me
the world in white
no scrapping noises, no horns or lights
everything is finally still and my heart beats quiet
the snow won’t last like in the midwest
the snow can’t cling to a thing
the snow stays soft

Colors + Moon

the shape is convex
made to be laid in
and my mouth retreats
as I roll over
sliding into the shell
left to fit only
a body my size

Sweet Moon, I aimed to eat you
but instead I’ll go on sleeping

my eyes closed I can smell the color seafoam
bleachy clean green
and a touch of fishy residue

Birds + Noise

The birds were all but deaf
wings outstretched headed a million
different directions
They could not arrive so they listen
involuntarily attended every holiday
heard the Packers play every Sunday
The rainbowescent sheen growing dusty
unable to shake the down
out of their coat

□ □ □ □ □

Heading Nowhere

Unable to sin quack quack
the bird bodies ascend in all directions
headed nowhere silently
glass eyes transfixed on all the corners
of the room or down, ready to dive
into the carpet pool

What sound does the duck make?
It is dead and mounted in the living room.

You cannot quack
despite my aunt asking
”what sound does the duck make"?”
you cannot flap your wingspan
and shed the coat of dust
accumulating on your oily sheen
Your journey will not complete
quiet duck, hung in our living room
happy to be attempting ascension
into a flat cream colored ceiling
We will name you and you will listen
to every breakfast, holiday, and wake
held here in the house

Dream + Fish

What I saw in the bowl was unexpected to say the least. Goldfish swimming. Small and large, tiny little tadpole like bodies, and some as plump as a tennis ball darting around. Their colors were a deep black spotted with bits of amber brown as if you were viewing their bright colors through the lens of sunglasses. Thankfully I caught sight of a large one just before I flushed. I removed the top of the tank to see if the school of fish had somehow swam up the piping. The inside of the tank was crowded with more goldfish. The only other option, if they hadn’t come up from the pipes, was they came out of my body. I had just relieved myself and that was the only other possible option. Upon closer inspection there was no defecation in the bowl at all. My mind jumped to my last meal. A homemade soup from my wife, vegetable based with big chunky garlic crouton’s she’d made herself. Before that a standard burrito. Had I had this school of stool fish floating inside me for some time? The jump in logic that the fish could somehow adapt to survive inside the intestines is… not too large honestly. A splash echoed up the sides of the bowl. But what am I to do with them now? So I decided to excavate them. One by one, slowly, starting with the largest fish I scooped them out with a slated spoon and dropped them into a salad bowl filled with fresh water. Plop plop plop they dropped in and continued to aimlessly swim. I named them at first. You will be Harry, you will be Jean. Quickly it was clear there were too many to name and Harry blended away with the rest. After an hour, several salad bowls filled with water and a good rise of my spoon, I bid adieu to the stragglers left in the tank. Good luck friends, I whispered, how unexpected our meeting. Now with four large full salad bowls of fish I needed to find another solution. In the bowls they swam in unison, lap after lap, but in sync even from bowl to bowl. A quirk of nature perhaps the circle of black became quite hypnotizing. then I snapped back into the kitchen noticing a small bit of debris in the center of each bowl. Twirling a spinning there were black flecks. In the current the fish were shedding. I chose to let them be and to carry on with my day, following back to my original plan I ad after using the restroom. Once an hour I’d pop back through the kitchen and take a look, still swimming, still shedding, round and round and round. After hour six nearly all the black and brown of their bodies rested at the bottom of the bowls. Their scales now shone a miraculous gold. Not orange but a glimmering radiant gold like that of a lost artifact being dusted off for the sun to find. Light danced over the edges of a bowl as if a rainbow were going to erupt and connect to the four bowls in the kitchen. Had these fish really been living inside me? What was I going to tell my wife about her soup when she returned home? Once their black layer was shed, the fish became leisurely, floating still, side to side. They still however stayed aligned and in sync. All facing the same direction, even across the different bowls they all faced the same end of the kitchen. The end of the kitchen where I stood. Enough was enough and my wife would be home soon, we could take these fish somewhere out of this kitchen and make them someone else’s issue (probably without mentioning they appeared from a bowel movement). I threw my hands up in decision and left the kitchen for the living room. As I traveled from the edge of the kitchen their orientation followed me and I froze. And they froze. These fish had a sense of knowing now in their bowls, they knew me, they must. I approached the nearest bowl, my eyes adjusting to the gold glare, and saw them blubbing their weird little mouths, sending out invisible smoke rings. Our eyes met and for a second I locked into a single fish, Harry maybe, and my impulse took over. I reached quickly into the bowl, my hand snatched up the fish, and in half a second I had swallowed it. I didn’t notice. I had to process. The salad bowls erupted, gold strikes shooting left and right in the bowls like the ocean were boiling. Light danced across the kitchen ceiling as if a night club was almost ready to close. I could feel the sense of joy and went back to the bowl. I found another fish floating still amidst all the commotion, and down it went. My wife would be home in forty minutes and I already knew I needed an excuse for the four dirty salad bowls.

Known + Unknown

Feeling of returning to place you’ve known that’s now unknown
someone changed somehow familiar
filled with unavoidable ghosts
strangers who you know parts of
drawn in ethereal lines but lines none the less
The wide overlap of a venn diagram of change
a difference layered on top of what hasn’t changed
both visible but blurry
Painted over bricks and murals I’ve never seen

you feel as if a place knows you as well as you know a place, that a place raised you, built you up, but places don’t cling to you, do not hold onto you, do not fight for you. You should not expect protection or affection or redemption when coming back to a place you knew. That place does not know you. Your footsteps are anonymous, that place never knew the momentum with which you moved.

□ □ □ □ □

Neighborhoods I knew are still
bisected by the street names I can dream of
The corners have new restauranteurs
but the namesakes have mostly remained
In a store someone knows my name
tells me they’ve watched the change
seen the old world third fall away
and the place I love
that made philly cheesesteaks
is gone

Foolishness + Fire

Standing in the fire complaining about the rain. Saying look, look how hard I burn. I built these flames, chopped the wood from a tree I fell with these bare hands, up rooted from the soil I laid, dragged with a wheel barrow, built from the scraps of my great great grandfathers first car, down a gravel road fifteen miles long.

Look now how orange the flames burn and the warm smell of birch bark as the edges roll back curling over themselves in the heat. Heat I made that crawls between my toes, heat that slaps behind my knees, up my back. This fire is mine, if you want some you will pry it cold from my dead hands.

I warm this land, look at the logs, splitting in the fire pit, charcoaled logs I carried on my back for a year, since I crawled from the womb I’ve had logs on my back. We all did and it was a better way of learning to walk, with all that weight, I was stronger, built better. Even with shin braces, at age six, that only made the world simpler. I got where I needed to go because of values, because of faith. That is what carries the weight of those logs. Even when squeakily I walked into the recruitment office to serve the very country I dumped the soil on that would grow the tree that is burning here.

See the heat lick my teeth and these tears are not for being wide eyed in the clouds of smoke circling me but for this here heartland, that I would die for, and for the right to tell you not to set your foot on this here heartland. Land my ancestors founded, land that never belonged to no one else, land that took two hundred years of toil, sweat, and blood to be settled. Land where I rode horses, brown lightning through the wild grass, cracking at my ankles, thinking we deserved to outrun the fired colors of sunset.

Look now how the orange flames take my ears and my knuckles are raw and white, see the puff of my chest escape pulled out of me, the heart inside me washed brown then black charcoaled like the logs, that turn to ash, to be ground in and walked over powerless to the next boot that will set foot upon this here land.

Pride + Strife

Free write dump from the idea of midwestern pride:

The only place you can find ice cream stands. Heartland and americana run stay. Heartland, when deer hunting season opens and the men tun into the woods and the women at home celebrate birthdays, taking deep breaths. Flannel and Farm and Fleet beat your drums. Pull of recognition against the idea of wanting to be left alone. Sense of pride in the struggle of just being alive.

In struggle and strife
we found pride
and entitlement
we are the heartland
we beat our chests bloody

There is no easy in the midwest
everyone is pulling themselves up
by their blue collar, every morning believing
the entire country would collapse
if they woke up dead

The core of our whole country
saying see us see our work
how well we survived
like marooned sailors found alive
years after their death certificates
but refusing to board the rescue vessel
until their name is appended with a royal title

Churches + Motorcycles

At Every Church Festival

CHURCH FESTIVALS
St. Aloisius
St. Bernard
St. Therese
St. Sebastian
St. Matthias
St. Vincent Pallotti
St. Elizabeth Ann Seton
St. John the Evangelist
Holy Apostles

MOTORCYCLES
Sportster
Road King
Softail
Trike
Lowrider
Touring
Wide Glide
Free Wheeler
Fat Boy

Makeshift motorcycle parking lots
Defined by the cones and caution tape
Spread plot along the sidewalk
Propped up the entire length of the block
Leading to the tilt-a-whirl screams
Behind them a steeple reigns
Overseeing the cheap beer and tattoo brands
of Harley Davidson

Going + Poetry

Where you not go and how you would not get there. I think there’s this inherent sense of motion in a good poem, even if that motion is standing still you move around in a space. I think all of us naturally as people are going, we’re moving, we’re pushing, we’re maybe being forced with the momentum of time to take another step towards anything, known or unknown. Everything that has lead us to this moment will lead to the next and the next and the next and it’s as natural as the breath in our lungs. The idea of trying not to go somewhere, to avoid the trip in any capacity I don’t think can make sense. Whether we want it or not, we’re moving forward.

△ △ △ △ △

You used to never cross Greenfield
then you met dad
then you’d never cross North Ave

You wouldn’t drive on the freeway
so between point A and point B
the only path was familiar side streets

You wouldn’t drive with the radio on
but when I was young
would take an art class and draw oranges

When I left for college
to the Southwest
we wouldn’t speak for a semester

Then the unimaginable
I would choose to move
to the worst place of all, California

You would tell me
”it would fall into the ocean”
and then I would move to Portland

Finally you would visit
but we cannot sit in silence
because you have to go home
a place that only you know

Lake Michigan + Shorelines

When I wanted to write, and I was sick of the parks, or the diners, I would turn to the lake. Naturally a writer wants to be near water. I would ride my bike down these back streets among the million dollar houses, houses with gates and buzzers to be let in. My bike was this old english touring bike my dad had when he was a kid and I’m honestly surprised it rode at all. I don’t think I ever greased the chain once. I’d cruise through these neighborhoods, in the fall, with the leaves changing around every corner, listening for the lake. Then I’d take a turn and end up on the shoreline suddenly. Not inaccessible but not made for a beach day. These huge boulders would run up and down the coast. Boulders that look like a volcano erupted thousands years ago, like between the crags you might fall into an underground cave system. The waves on the northshore always felt darker than the beach further south. There was no breakwall, no barrier, and these boulders would take the full slap of the waves over and over. I’d leave my bike near the curb and climb my way through them, stand atop them like a lightning rod asking like a Moses for the water to part. Then I’d climb down toward the water, behind the boulders, out of sight of the trimmed hedges and fences. I’d find somewhere flat to sit and imagine if I would stay here until I died how long would it take to be found. Then in summer, when the dorms, without AC, were heat packed and the walls were sticky with sweat, I would go back to those boulders. The flat spot still there, probably still there now. The water between the rocks was absolutely still, perfectly clear, the flat sand at the bottom like a carpet. I’d sit there and write, then strip down and get in the water. The world shedding off of me into the calm water, dispersing like a firework. I could close my eyes knowing the waves would come back eventually and pull the world that fell off me back out into the ether and I’d hope no one stole my bike and ride home.

□ □ □ □ □

Shorelines never end
a peeling thread that follows us
along a lake that goes on forever
forever as far as my eyes can see
tracing the horizon boundless in reality
fresh water waves ask the same questions
again & again & again & again
Out there somewhere is Michigan and Paris
All the space above the waves
is filled with hope and we can keep hoping
knowing we can drink up and make more

Burnt + Beach

A quiet way of saying you’ve been burnt. Of telling the room you met destiny, met fate. She took your mouth in her hands, with your eyes closed, and as she drew you in for a kiss. But your eyes opened and you were left on a small rock surrounded by tiny white capped waves, off the coast of a cold beach, gray sand expanding forever. That’s what your voice sounds like in this room of acquaintances. That’s every story you share, no matter the lift of the beginning. No matter the hopefulness or joy in the story before it. You drag the room back to that beach. Make us stand ankle deep in the cold water, let us stand, listening, wondering if we will grow more numb. Forcing us to see you waving from your rock, shouting over what should be a calming clap of the tide. The water, climbs up our pant legs, makes the little unshaven hairs on our calves dance and sway or are they trying to escape. Everyone is holding a picnic basket where they’ve shuddered their compassion, next to blue plaid napkins and a seltzer water. We see the clouds rolling forward in slow motion over the waves. The water reaches our knees and unaware we shiver through the drone of your voice. Someone on the left side is trying to talk but as they try to say a name their teeth turn to sand, spitting, their neck snaps and with a sploosh they are under the water, gone. You are point from your rock, gnashing your fangs, tearing at your shirt, showing the sky the marks of life across your back, old white washed trails of where lighting struck you. We sit and watch your reveal, the water carrying out our picnic baskets, bobbing off, while the waves tease at our chests, knocking on our lungs saying let me in let me in. Then you realize. We see your face, the look of an animal who realizes they are out classed and in over their head. The rock is almost entirely gone, consumed back to the ocean. The clouds have beckoned a drizzle. We watch you process and see your conclusion that fate has again made a fool of you. You sit with us and close your eyes as a wave crashes over you and you vanish.