THE FUTILE SAVER OF SHELLS

How many years have I spent shoving air into your lungs?
My back bowed above your limp limbs, my hands sunk between your ribs.

Sand scatters through my room in the fan’s breeze.
Those ruined castles in my bed once meant something.

My grandfather wrote a love letter sixty years ago.
“Your sea glass eyes deserve far more than these ceaseless tides.”

Hearts can become shells. Currents crash through chambers
And salt mines form in veins: the ocean’s elegy on emptiness.

I’ve been to thirty-eight lighthouses in my life, but I could never
Learn to be that lifeline, that beacon to the buoys barely floating.