He’s at the beach listening
to the jet skis and bowriders,
as they battle waves and wakes,
the sea gulls remote today,
keeping their own judgment,
or fucking in the dunes,
like teenagers.
He’s never seen gulls
fuck and imagines it would be
by the most accessible
method in the animal kingdom:
him on top, behind her,
wearing a little blue bird condom,
her objecting, screeching as he orgasms
(too quickly of course),
and her flailing, trying to escape,
shielding her ears with her wings,
him, now, foraging for a post-coital pretzel stick
somewhere in the sand or lying
unprotected on a beach blanket,
in his remorse, wanting only another chance
and simultaneously none.
He wants to know desire,
the sad dark widow of it and
where all these eggs come from,
and why? What was the point of it?
Nothing ever changes, the frigid winters,
the lack of food, the begging,
the night’s lonely nest,
the small chirpings and the worry,
the constant worry that sands away
his life, his reason, his self.
He dreams of small contraptions,
like Rube Goldberg machines,
the cogs and sprockets and conveyors,
the levers and buckets and the silver ball
rolling down the track, leaping,
flipping open a drawbridge,
the steel ball plummeting into
the bucket of a Ferris wheel,
that long convoluted,
treacherous track where
any miscalculation
might disrupt or destroy
a calculated chain of events,
till it emerges at the other side,
a silver egg, which brings
him his reflection,
convexly distorted,
larger than life, obscene
and pointless, never
to hatch, halted, ultimately,
by gravity…

He is alone now,
with neither purpose
nor satisfaction,
and with nowhere left
to
fall
to.

There is for him,
no longer, the warm cocoon
of the womb,
as he whispers a single word
that is ripped away by the wind,
and lost forever.