empty beach

I feel you honey. I see you. I taste you. Through the hollow stillness I reach out my hand and gently press my fingers against yours. Elysium greets us with the old familiar smell of swirling white asphodel. The wind tickles the trees and scatters the playful leaves. I open my eyes and look down at my arms. In this dream the skin is smooth, no scars.

In this dream there are no scars.

I think of the past - a time before you. When I was a little boy my grandparents would often warn me to be wary of the undertow. Just a little shit in a white sun hat, colorful swim trunks, beach pail and shovel hunting for sand crabs. They said to be mindful of the undertow as it would sweep me away and dump me out into the open ocean. Unfortunately as I grew up I worried about it less and less. In time, I let the waves crash over me and the tide whisked me away. Tumbling and thrashing unable to tell down from up, unable to discern right from wrong, helpless to breath on my own accord I lost sight of the shoreline long ago and now I'm alone in the dark as below me loom ominous shadows.

And so I came to drown in a raging sea of you.

I take a drag from an American Spirit and gaze out across the city, half-shut eyes absorbing the dazzling tableaux of lights and life. I lift the stick to my lips and fill my lungs with swirling wizard smoke. Quiet. Just the soft hum of the city at night and if I listen closer I can hear the feint drone of voices behind a far off wall. Voices. And I wish I knew what they say. I watch the city lights. Every night I look for a sign that will most likely never come. I hope to hear a voice I am sure I will never again hear. I hold on to these fading memories so dear which crumble before me like Pompeiian statues for I know in Heaven all I will have are these memories and foolish dreams. I tumble, twist, and turn in this widening gyre. Here is my soul exposed, and the wounds throb and peel.

A lifetime of here I am still caught in the undertow.

And I find it kind of funny,
I find it kind of sad.
The dreams in which I'm dying
are the best I've ever had.

redemption?

He smiles at me through broken teeth and tells me what I want to hear. What I need to hear. Forgotten thoughts scatter before me like autumn leaves with a soft "shhhhhh" and a crackle. I sigh and sit back closing my eyes to the feeling I yearn to forget. I tell him, with a soft whisper, to go away and leave me alone. Alone with my lack of thoughts and the quiet hum in the back of my head with which silence marks her arrival with.

How sweet it were, hearing the downward stream,
With half-shut eyes ever to seem
Falling asleep in a half-dream.
To dream and dream.

To dream and dream and never awake for fear of facing this pain and regret he so longs to forever forget. Scared shitless selfish coward fuck hiding in the shadows for he knows the sun will burst him into flame and his ashes lost into the wind, condemned to obscurity. Lost and never found. So he hides, lurks rather, in a back room cheap motel filthy bedroom rented out by the hour. And perhaps he welcomes death, sweet Elysium beckons, because he knows behind the wall so far away, she waits.