The Beach
Llandudno Beach.
Crystal rocks emulating the moon. Anthropomorphic cirrus warriors transmutate in the salty breath of Neptune’s toothless smiling mouth.
His gums are covered in a cooling layer of rabid foam.
I hear his tummy roaring from the depths.
Why is he hungry, I wonder?
Could it be for my soul?
A young man walks by carrying a book.
“What’s that book?”
“The Beach.”
“But you’re on the beach.
Why do you have to read about it?”
“It’s better. Double whammy.”
He walks out onto the sea.
Out of the corner of my eye I notice that the waves have petrified.
The young man carries “The Beach” away from the beach and over the horizon.
A helicopter buzzes above me and down past my line of vision.
There is the sound of an explosion.
Brittle pieces of crystal rock and sea strafe my face,
whittling these cheeks away to the bone.
Beneath the surfaces of the shattered beach, rocks, and sea
is the trace of an earlier, erased surface;
itself the representation of a long-vanished text
about beaches, sea, sky, and rocks.
This is palimpsestic.
I close my eyes but there is no eyelid.
I am both the film upon which this image is impressed and the image itself, curling spatially onto the patina of my eyeballs.
The illusion of interior exterior is exposed.
It is clear now that the moon was always emulating these rocks
emulating the crystal beach
at Llandudno.
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