"Seashore"

Silently creeping deviance,
She swam to the shore, cigarette ablaze
With the light of the moonlit glow
That glazed her eyes red revenge,
Sopping seashells ripe with twist tide longing,
The sand swept beneath the banisters
Of love-besotted toenails, plastered
Pink from hotel room pedicures.
Stains on the carpet shaped like
Nepalese immigrants, garishly decked out in
Folklore ramshackle melodies,
Was all she remembered
Under furrowed brows,
Dripping soft waterboarding streams
On her visual horizon.
It would all be over once the sun rose,
Feeling wind rustle the strands of
A messy mop that used to be ten feet longer
When she was a girl,
It was possible to still see that smile,
The one that used to light elementary school auditoriums
With the joy only the proudest of parents could imagine,
A dancing, glowing rip in the atmosphere
Which told those not knowing love
To look it in its blood-spackled eyes.
There in that lonely vacuum
Which once stood smiling,
The thoughts of the rifling, violent boat ride
Lingered maleficent,
They knew they couldn't drink the water,
The brine collecting at the bottom of tin canteens,
Whistling empty in the sea-soft foam,
Tinkling glass shards of salt
Rampaging their way against its insides,
Forming piles of sand along the coast
Of their abdomens, torn apart by some sort
Of rotten meat along the voyage,
Home that is;
Or at least that was where she stood now,
Eyes fixed on the visage of a broken window,
Dividing the shoreline in its wake,
They'd be asleep now no doubt,
But her arrival would be shocking enough,
Jarring enough to wake them from any slumber
Worth dreaming of.
If only she were awake,
The nightmarish future glimmering bright,
Towards the bereft longing for the safety
Of the wooded cabins,
The loneliness of a drifting ocean,
Humming helicopter tiptoes
Through the crashing shores of time.
And just as the door was ripped open
By a man unknown to her,
One whose breath smelled of gasoline,
Dripping delicately down his coated throat
Of bilge-rat wine, musty cheeses
Draped over a mustache which resembled Peru
In certain lights.
They stood looking at each other,
The shore keeping time as they glazed
Over fleeting press-pass images,
That cascaded in their minds
In time to the gentle tapping
Of the broken-down boats tied
On loose dog-leashes to the dock.
Only this wasn't it,
Through the daze of the midnight moon,
Luminosity told not of a past
She could feel in the arms of the man,
With the subtle blinking of mascara-streamed eyes,
Black rivulets ran roughshod over her trembling lips,
Quiet with the hush of a gentle bird's crow,
Creeping softly through the night's dim sky.
The sea rose and fell through her heaving breast,
With the neon, hotel-red flickering light
Of a soaked cigarette dangling loosely
On the tips of her mouth,
And all his eyes screamed back were
The burns of the wet, reluctant ashes.