It starts like a joke:
Two conch shells head-to-head running down the beach.
Inhabited of course – I didn’t know until I asked – by crustaceans.
A disguise I was told, by a member of staff.
We inhabit costumes, ramble down the shores of our own slim narratives, for all intents and purposes, to seek parity.
Some semblance of goodwill, between life and death.
If not spiritual, then, what you submit you expect to receive.
A quid pro quo in celestial terms
But at heart we’d make do with a return on the misfortune
life seems to dump
For example on a crab running down a beach hidden in a conch shell.
Circumstance is a cracked egg.
It is neither good nor bad.
What you took from the whole you found in the rubble.
The good things are scarce.
Desire is phony, half the time, in what it pays back.
A novel I just read put it this way.
We are hunters in the dark.
Quite literally for those crabs in hard shells.
Simple scavengers with simple reasons for doing what we do.
Trademarked by potluck.
Earmarked for a bout of untold history.
You reap what you sew?
I am totally ambivalent.
Life as a tyrant with my flip-flops.
And the deadly stop I made at that shop, today.
There’s nothing as regular as waves,
All the same,
When you hear that guffaw
Har-rar, har-rar
They (plural I guess) seem like some seasoned spectator.
The ushers of disaster,
Roll-up, roll-up
As if terra firma was a circus
It might have to finally weep at.
There was another part in that novel,
About through which it said love was a river
where life boils.
A becalming instant that dulls excess.
Through which futility finds address.
Where moths, I guess, crash into stars.
But less than that, where dogs might recoil.
At ease.
I’ve seen your strange face in my own eyes and I am sorry I never said anything.
I’ll be sorry when you die,
but let’s not let it get to that.
Racing down a beach.
In the darkness.
