Where There's More Than a Small Death

───

It's more than being back on that beach

               The 4 year old

               wandering through the bodies

Courier of a time

Scanning the distal carcasses for a lost mother









White sands under soles

Bared skin mapping a life ahead by his sun

               White hair

               And the 9 man's muscled form

sighted in the 3 feet of this firm bellied precedent

















The masterless beauty of that beach

begins to stain with a moribund sickening

               metastasizing from the biological

               to the ethereal gut of the child









Because Death is on the beach

Death has also been walking

Death has been scanning the same bodies

               And now Death

is just 7 steps behind our 4 year old boy









And in the nucleus of the pairs fleshly stroll is:

                  extinction

                  annihilation

                  elimination

                  extermination

                  ruin

Cut from his life giving sun and mother

                  [but still holding his temporal duty]

The child is at risk

from the very furthest corner of his eye

where there's more than a small death