BEACHED
On the sunny island of friendship
ash was falling from our faces.
“This is not subtle,” the doc said.
He prescribed a regimen of pills
the size of Montaigne’s chateau.
My head shrank to a bungalow
in Far Rockaway, and I recalled
the ghost ship of our childhoods
beached against the boardwalk
where a hurricane had tossed it.
Here on Grub Street we crash
‘arse first and facing frontwards’
like buckets of dots and dashes
with stories of our heroic travels.
–Jan Herman