by the ocean

There was a beautiful young lady at the end of long a dock. I could hear the sounds of the ocean all around me. The air smelled like salt. The wood on the dock was peeling up from age. Without shoes, your feet would be torn to ribbons. She was looking down at her shoes a while and she looked up at me. Never noticed I was standing there.

She put out her arm and motioned for me to come closer with her fingers. But I was afraid. The wood of the dock could collapse from under my feet and I'd be feed for the sharks below without a hope of getting out of there alive. They can smell blood and I've many an open wound from transversing the world, being weathered with the seasons like a stone in a riverbed.

Scars all over my body from beautiful women who tasted like cigarettes but never of love or compassion. From where they'd claw into my back as I made love to them but in the meantime I was only a cheap fuck.

Scars from all the friends who held knives behind their back. Some used them as foodholds to climb up on my shoulders, pull my dreams out of the air and smash them on the ground below. Some just wanted to see me bleed, hiding a cruel smile behind their teeth.

This girl is my way out. If only I could reach. If only she could write down her telephone number and send it to me via paper airplane, but it'd blow away with the breeze. This girl is familiar and I can feel it in an open wound in my chest. This feeling... I've had it before but it never was seen to fruition. I know her face, I know the way she tastes and I know the softness of her skin.

That finger that she motions with, that she's beckoning me with has touched my face and cleared my eyes of tears. Her voice rings in my ears with a million apologies and harsh words. She doesn't taste like cigarettes and she spits when she kisses me because I do. She doesn't taste like alcohol.

She is an angel. But when she was painted into existence, she was left unfinished. She is broken and she's broken me. But I can't help but admire her here, by the ocean.