The bed sagged like a cracked raft,

smelling of rust, salt, and lost time.

The other side was hollowed out,

a dent where someone used to dream.

The air bent yellow at the edges.

A radio somewhere cracked and whined —

low country and western misery,

a voice leaking out about someone who never came home.

The floor leaned west, 
always west,

because that's where things go 
when they’re too tired to fight.

The clock on the wall had stopped 
sometime last night,

but no one noticed, 
not even the dark.

The sea dragged the dead nets, 
and the chain inside the walls, 
hummed low 
against the bones of the room.

It ran through my empty wallet,

through my cracked teeth,

through the long thin cigarettes 
burning themselves out.

It rattled whenever I breathed too hard.

The motel bible sat open on the nightstand,

a page torn loose,

a note scrawled in blue ink:

"don’t wait for me."

I tasted rust,

saw the green of rotting rope,

felt the floorboards creak 
with a tired red sadness.

White gulls circled low,
no purpose left;
their shadows vanish
into the sea’s forgetting.

I thought about standing up,
walking toward the window,
singing along 
with the sad broken radio.

I didn’t move. 
The tide had already 
taken everything.

Ocean Cay, Atlantic Ocean

Clouds move

like thoughts—

shapeless, then clear,

then gone.

The wood beneath me

leans and softens.

A crab—small, rust-red—

clicks past

without meaning.

They say

the notion of emptiness

was understood here once.

No sermon.

No symbol.

Just the tide

covering what it could.

Not loss.

Not absence.

But space

for the self

to rise—

shadow and light

together.

The sea

keeps no stories.

It lifts,

it leaves.
I sit,

and let it.

Peaks Island, Maine

She came through the lobby

in heels that sounded like secrets,

dragging a suitcase
that probably held regrets

neatly folded

next to a book of spells.

The clerk said she had

that look—
like she’d once been painted

on the side of a bomber plane,

or whispered about

in backseats and divorce papers.

They gave her Room 237,

because of course they did.

Where else would a woman like that stay

but down the hallway

that never quite ends?

She ordered champagne at midnight,

left no tip,

and signed the bill

“Love, Karma.”

Some say she rewrote dreams.

Others, that she stole them.

Mostly, she just waited—

watching time melt down the window

like candle wax.

Men dropped around her
like poker chips at a rigged table,
grinning through the gamble,
and left with their names

misspelled in the mirror.

When the flowers stopped

and the world got bored

of her perfume and promise,

she slipped into the velvet-lined box

beneath the lobby gift shop,

a mannequin saint

with sale tags on her sins

and a crucifix worn

like costume jewelry.

Now tourists lean in,

take photos,

whisper,

"Wasn’t she someone?"

And somewhere—

behind the front desk,

or in the static of the lobby jazz—

the universe clears its throat,

adjusts its tie,

and laughs,

quietly,

into its infinite hand.

Scarborough, Maine

They were Georgia Boots,
Comfort Core.
No comfort left.
Soles gone to hell,
inlay peeled like burnt skin
on a long drunk  summer.

He used to wear ’em
to the docks—
not for the job
just to look like he had one.
Said the boots gave him posture
even when he had none.

The bench was his confessional.
“Seven cups,” he muttered,
“they all looked good
in the morning fog.”

Money.
A woman who called him “baby.”
A trailer with a flag, a fridge
full of cheap beer.
A crappy transistor radio
always tuned to the same static.
He liked the noise more than silence—
silence reminded him
of his old man’s fists
and the day he slammed the door
and never came back.

She came like the others—
eyes like storm warnings,
barefoot in winter,
mouth full of someone else’s song.
He loved her
like a fire:
too close,
too long,
burned down to bone.

Every choice-
a ghost
that kissed his cheek
and walked off with his wallet.

He died right there,
on the bench that knew his weight,
where the pigeons ignored him
and the cops didn’t bother.

Boots side by side,
one insole flopped out
like a tired tongue,
a half-smoked cigarette still warm
in the groove of the slats.
No note. No name.
Just a man 

who kept picking
the wrong cup.

Portland, Maine

NOTE:
I carry my camera with me wherever I go. One day, after photographing a pair of abandoned, laceless boots, I began to wonder who might have left them behind and what his story could be. In a moment of synchronicity, the tarot card I pulled that day was the Seven of Cups—a card associated with choices, illusions, desires, and the tension between fantasy and reality.

The wolf should've snapped her neck.
The deer should've bolted.
hat's the law, right?
Kill or run.
How it's supposed to be.
How it always was.

But here they are -
him in a secondhand suit
smelling like old rain and bad decisions,
her draped in a dress made of soft mistakes.

He's thinking,
another kill won't fix the hunger.
She's thinking,
another escape won't fix the fear.

And outside the glass,
the world hums along,
hungry for blood,
hungry for failure,
hungry for the beautiful ruin of it all.

They lean into each other
like broken doors swinging on the last hinge,
not lovers,
not saviors,
just two things too tired to keep lying.

The world wants them to hate,
to run,
to tear each other apart.

What they do instead -
this slow, brutal, stupid tenderness -
is the worst kind of rebellion.

The glass between them and the street
is spidered with cracks -
each one a little white lie the world told,
each one a rule they broke.

He's melting at the edges now,
becoming a man, becoming a memory,
becoming something the wolf was never meant to be.

She shimmers,
not prey anymore,
not even real maybe,
just some miracle walking
through the wreckage.

Sirens smear across the sky,
time drips down the walls,
and still they sit -
choosing each other in a world that stopped believing.

This is what survival looks like sometimes:
not teeth,
not speed,
but a hand on a shoulder,
a weight leaned into,
a promise made with nothing but breath.

and they sit shoulder to shoulder,
defying the ugly machines that built them,
trading the last thing that matters:
the stupid, beautiful, suicidal act
of choosing tenderness
when nothing else makes sense.

Lenox, Massachusetts