Up Just Ahead
Aimless, uncommanded feet
move me along the shore,
and take me closer to nowhere—
up just ahead, where more
saltwater waits to roll fizzing
up the beach among
my toes – to burble, sigh, leave—
licking my soles with its raspy
tongue.
Another fifty yards and
I pause to look around:
still somewhere, short of nowhere,
And forever nowhere-bound.
Looking back to see the footprints
of the places I’ve been wading,
I find that my past somewheres
are, slowly, to nowhere fading.
There’s no retreating to the past
I’ve passed. So I move on—squelching
over foot-sucking sand to the vast,
ominous future. It waits
up just ahead—grinning among
the somewheres—and teases, taunts, flirts …
licking my soul with its raspy
tongue.
I can't remember if this is one of the poems I wrote for my college class, or just something I did on my own. What I do know is that it's the only poem I ever submitted to be published. I'd been browsing the Internet and reading some amateur poetry sites when I found a link to a publishing company looking for poem submissions. Well, it turned out to be practically a scam -- yeah, they took your poem and praised it, and then they published this big book and wanted to charge you $100 bucks to buy it so you could see your own stuff in print. It made me really mad. But I took just a little solace that the poem was one of the few they published that won an award. Funny, because I don't think it's my best work -- too be honest I'm still not sure what I meant by the future licking my sould with a raspy tongue, but I liked the image and it was a new way to present that line after using it to describe the feel of the waves running back under my feet. I'm sure there are about a gazillion poems about people walking on the beach, but I am just audacious enough to think this one's a little bit different.
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