Hotel coffee creamer trails back to ignition,
before beachside dovetail into the Oregonian horror story.

Sea trees listen to lying minds and American radio repeats,
plumpest gulls in flight widen circles around rainbow kites
that will never cross oceans with that many strings attached
straight as lined paper above sand dollars and beached bright crab meat.

The end creeps in from spilling cinnamon oceanic reaching as palms
from a body that lost the long swim to shore, but it arrived anyway.

All the Pacific catches on fire and everyone leaves seaside hotels for a dip.
Elderly Southerners drag sleep apnea machines in trenches as children stop
on crystal smoked gold sand to write out the name of a burning stranger
they’ll first love before rising swell flames claim misspelled indiscretions
spelled out before the inferno takes those fingers swimming out to parents
who already lost touch and found fire more profound than any will to live.

Waves rushing beachfront whistle with established desperation.
I don’t think there’s anything softer. I traveled here, and so did the tide.

Nightscape beach mutt howls as low moon extinguishes flames on water
and sheets of skin unroll in as kites join sandcastles without hands
to never tease them again.

Flames take names written but never loved.

This isn’t how people died on the Oregon Trail
but death adjusts to our quality of life.

Seaweed feathers from afternoon bird suicides at sea layered in driftwood spell
HAPPY FATHER’S DAY
and I know no one can leave that for me on any beach, so this has to be the end.