Looking for a little seaside town hereabouts. Not polished white homes with tubs of pansies, but houses that grew wings and arms instead of standing still through time's passing.
A well-worn sea town too bare knuckled to need a taffy store, but with enough sense of origin that tattoo parlors outrun nail salons and self-tanning spas.
The kind of town where once grand sea captains' homes still harbor families that throw their nets into the sea.
A town where divers found treasure from the dumpsters of the seas and flaking paint advertises the winds that guide the ships ashore.
And always a church to anchor it all, bringing calm to Sunday mornings following raucous Saturday nights.
Where those that deserve it most, have the best view.
I am dreaming of that little town where even Mary calls upon sea serpents to guard the doors.
Where proud obelisks spike the marine layer perfumed with sea and bear witness to the names of the sailors and lovers that stumbled into port. Where tumbledown grabs you by the throat and you have to pick your way carefully around whatever floats up on the shore, lest you lose your way and remain there, evermore.
But if you do, and your once proud flesh is sunken into the earth, let it be marked by two sticks that once kept you afloat, sturdy prow, neat bow, plank by plank your death and your salvation. Let your flesh leach into the soil and your bones soak into the ground water until you float, cell by cell across the ocean on the jet stream, only to return captured in a barnacle glued to the back of a whale that breaches across the sound on a day heavy with sky, a tail slap echoing across the centuries.
