SeaBoards

Mental Sunshine
There is a resort on the tropical shores of my mind , the tide
laps up on the white sands like a playful dog.
We're all wearing shirts with Hibiscus leaf or topical fish patterns,
stenciled palm trees swaying in a department store breeze.
Fresh crispy leather sandals from the discount rack.
"Hey, that guy from 'the office' where he's gay in that movie, what was he reading? Prowst? Howdya' say it?"
Proust.

Atlantic Movements
tiny gods, create and destroy civilizations of sand and shell
- sacrificed in the deluge of salt and sea.
Umbrellas pop like colored mushroom tops,
tanned, fed and dreaming fauna bob like corks as the lifeguard's whistle calls like a clarion.
The sleepy waders hear, and move, a little, and everywhere the taste of salt and old stirs, gently,
the leviathan of ageless and nameless things in the soul,
a flutter of sea-birds in the heart.
Floating in the memory of you, every now and then,
touching the floor
of sharp and pointed things.

Anna
I hear you
rattling around in the back of your sentences, your drinking laughter
when your talk is a room of messy unlabeled boxes, spilling on the linoleum,
hiding your bottles in your baskets
On the freckle, on your neck an old man is selling poppies (he was personally effected)
But your hands are lions that do not tell the truth
and your mouth is a beautiful iron gate
some days, when you are not here, it is easy to touch you
and speak your name aloud

These Days
These days are a cigarette smoked under an oak tree, the sussuration of a blackwater creek (they skip past me on the way to parties, or playing frisbee)
Like young lovers they cast their desires into the air like autumn leaves, embrace fiercely.
I tickle these days.
These days are so good I give them names and play hooky with them.
These days see people's faces.
They are the D chord on a guitar, the first time I read "the Weir", my first girlfriend.
These days are a trumpet solo: a flurry of ecstatic notes, a band of freckles, tanned fingers, ice cubes (white wine), all the people I can remember.
These days ring in my ear like blessed solitude, holy silence,
a whole hierarchy of fecund joys that whisper fire languages.
They appear on the horizon, a candle-lit cathedral (like a Spanish galleon), carrying special things.
I gather my angels on the shores of night, singing softly, fingering beads, to wait for
these days.

A Zoo at the End of the World
Bored Pandas munch bamboo, and pray secret death prayers in their sad, childless eyes.
Cassanova, fat and insane-drunk, throws mixed nuts at them while he drinks singapore slings from a sunbleached "Superman Returns" 64 oz. Slurpee Cup."You fuckin' deadbeats!"
Mothers whisk their daughters away to the Aviary to see the rare California, white-tailed whatever.
Icarus breaks his fall with a bouquet of runaway, mirror-backed Gorilla balloons holding valentine's day hearts that say "Let's Monkey Around" with a loud pop into the Polar Bear's Pen. Children from suburb's with Parents on Saturday watch in horror as an emaciated, adorable, caged, wild animal feeds himself.
"Flew too High" a bored father says as he checks his messages and puts his cell phone back into his fanny pack.
The lion stalks his bubble-gum, cigarette speckled cage and dreams of dark ebony faces with ivory teeth.
"I used to spar with gods and Nubian princes, my life was a repast."
"Christ!" Ernest says with a shake of the head "Some limey poof went lolling around Africa with a bottle'a'laudanum naming things in latin and now this," Hemingway rips off his shirt and jumps into the cage.
Julian, John Wayne, and St. Peter are staring into the Cumaean Sybil Exhibit.
"This is fucking horrible," Wayne says, "Let's get a snack and look at those happy, little sea-otters."
At the snack bar two black kids are playing tag, one trips and skins his knee. "Slow down kids" Bukowski says, putting his cigarette out against a bronze statue of of Sir Francis Galton. He takes a flask out and pours some Powers Scotch into his Coke Zero can. "These hell dogs are gonna come after us next."

A Little Beach Music
The sound of those paddles.
The ball doesn't even bounce.
They have to stand so close together and no matter how good they are they still drop the ball every five seconds and joke about it like they are really enjoying themselves but there is an edge in both of their voices that is so obvious that it becomes even more obvious that they are both straining under an enormous effort to try and convince the other person that they want to play this stupid (what do you even call it Beach, Paddle, NoBouncing, Loud, Plastic Ball Annoy Everyone Else On The Beach,Tennis) game it's Orwellian.

2 plus 2 equals 5 to this couple.

ICE CREAM, GET YOUR ICE, Non, Va BENE Non C'e Male Si? I should have said something I remember a little, oh 1$ bottles at the Ocean Drive I should, how much do you think those pilots make?Yeah, he looks like your typical college kid, Hail Mary full of Grace, is it Sunday? No that's just some radio station, a radio station of nuns,

I have let's see,
No I've read too much non-fiction on this vacation,
I have to pee a little.

The Ocean is huge.

I mean huge.
I don't even think that it can convey it's hugeness to me.
Bully, it's just big because it's a function of it's sense that it's winning.
I don't know what that means.
I can't remember the last time that I was amazed.
Vince Walsh, that might have been the biggest moment of self-disclosure in my life, I just don't remember to remember that some days.
I wonder how he's doing?
We want to be amazed. Like Children with soft watery eyes, in darkened movie theaters.
We want glorious and transcendent things to happen. Mostly just money. I would buy a house with a tunnel and a mag-lev train that would go to Mike's house and Tom's house in my basement.
Francine and Haley would love that.
Mike's Kitchen is turning into a monster.

They shouldn't even sell boards shorter than those 7'4" funboys, that kid has been out there an hour and he hasn't caught one wave.
I should switch to the tin whistle.
Not as cumbersome, less maintenance.
"A Lazy man I'll not Maintain"
Who talks like that? These guys over here talk movie. That is their language. The commerce of words and images of motion picture studios. I'm just like that too.
This guy keeps touching his biceps and looking into the distance. He's posing. Tool-Box.

You can spot the fathers. I am not a father, but I feel for them. I think I know the yearning for a little peace and solitude that they experience. Bags under the eyes, still a little hung over from the temporary escape, old Phillie's hat, head buried in a book. Clancy, Leonard, Koontz, King, maybe Scottoline never Percy, Greene, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Hemingway. I've never seen a copy of "The Old Man and the Sea" in the hands of an old man by the sea. He's already thinking of the million fucking things that he has to do to make ends meet.

Children Oblivious.

The mothers are eaten by the same things but differently, stretched a little more somehow. I don't feel that kind of pressure, not yet, certain I will someday.

Come to think of it: Why would an Old Man by the Sea read "The Old Man and the Sea"? Mortality, wasted potential, feelings of failure and inadequacy. Some things really do hit too close to home. They accuse too deeply, reveal too much. "So near to my heart this fatal wound sin" and all of that. For the late-twenties set:

1.) The Gospels - If you say "Jesus what a sweet guy" you haven't actually read him.
2.) High Fidelity - For any selfish man who has experienced regret and listens to music.
3.) Lost in the Cosmos - Ever felt alone? You are.
4.) The Philokalia - Everything is emphatically not "all good". Your instincts are correct.
5.) A Refutation of Moral Relativism - It's right there in the title. This little knockout doesn't pull any punches.
6.) The Closing of the American Mind - Learn from a great American educator, the late great Alan Bloom.
7.) Grammars of Creation - Your mind has been systematically impoverished through the impoverishment of language.

Sea Isle City
I found it when I took a vacation, it was in the bushes, right underneath the deck.
Some kids, maybe, or a pickle jar that fell out of the recycling container.
It snapped into focus: all of the houses and families and dollars, incessant scramble, the tumblequickrecline vacationdream sandbooze from the Atlantic City Expressway
the pine tree corridor, the wardrobe to happy shores of coppertone and beachfiction, where cumulus clouds take long rides and sit in the sun all day.
Walls of laughter and forgetting are built like sandcastles out of cases of coors light, sunburn, and crabcakes.
I found this place, on vacation.