ocean city justwrite

We need the clock more than we need a hairbrush, sand in the air teasing our roots so we wonder where we come from more than where we're going until the music fades into the bags under our eyes, into our footprints before more waves come, frothing, wondering how crabs can swim when they have so many legs and so few feet. I feel like that sometimes, when I'm balancing on the Earth as it spins around the sun so fast I can't count the revolutions, cities growing and vines sinking back into the ground, the swollen corpses of seaweed tangling themselves around my ankles, begging for my eyes to stop searching the horizon for the exact place the sky begins, the clouds climbing up as you try to crawl inside my chest because you don't yet know what my heart sounds like that close, how loud and uncertain its song is, like chanted words you can't understand even though the language they use is the same as yours but more angry. Water mixes with bleach around your hands, spots dissolving permanently and new ones forming in the negative so the light you shine through them throws shadows that are more accurate than your memories, and I realize my skin is mist that is fading into yours, and I've lost the colors I used to fling desperately into the wind, wishing the rain would find that puddle which used to be a lake and the rainbows would call the rainbow trout back home again so I could stare at the lines on your face and finally see what they're trying to spell, and as the tides change and the seconds find themselves more quickly, I speak.