The waves crash and part against the black rocks.
I envy the water’s graceful mindless movement.
It is lined by a gray sky and a gray beach.
I cannot tell myself apart from either except
for the feeling of acidic color coursing through me.

As I walk, I examine the lifeless crab parts littered across the sand.
They have lost all facets of the vitality and animation
that once defined them, struggling to merely maintain all that is left of them-
that is, their emptiness. It is their most solid trait that lasts the longest,
but even that is ephemeral and will be ground down into all matter’s true amorphism.
It only proves that what is superficial always remains
after the softer flightier insides have gone.

Except they are not soft. They are hard and intense.
And just like everything else of value and originality,
they are fleeting, the only evidence of their existence words and art.
It is only through these that we might preserve our actual persons beyond ourselves.
However these too are subject to the curse of temporality.

This beach is a corpse; it has lost its pulse and hardness.
Everything that made it substantial has withered.
It remains a mere vestige of its past life,
and yet I am jealous of its particular form of mortality.