my lungs runneth over


Playing lifeguard
to your drowning victim is
an every weary labor. A failed
choreographed soliloquy
as tired as a channel swimmer
half dead at
half mark and
high tide.
Exhausted from milling
toward
the canopy of crushed rock remnants
being coddled by
a wrinkled, strangulating
liquid scarf.

Decades of erosion toiled
to form the sand for
beach.
It took you only months
to crush my ribcage
into
tiny grains of carcass.



© 2001, Arden Davidson