Tequila Sunrises and other shots.....

5:34 A.M......

Mad cats spitting over chicken bones owned the abandoned Tiki Deck. Their Halloween silhouettes arched and tiptoed across the splintered planks, smiling with greasy lips and staring at me with liquid eyes. I mimicked them. Arched my back and tippy-toed past their rheumy faces, past the early morning stench of Friday night beer bottles....

And dove..... feet first,

fanny next, over the mountainous sand dune, onlto the cold wet sand, bulldozed flat by a midnight tide....

The sleepy pink sky flirtatiously batted her eyes and golden streaks of her mascara rained onto the the glassy sea.

"Good Morning Sunshine".....I whispered.....

"I've come to find peace"......

And then I ran.....in the cold coquina laced sand. Barefooted and free.

At the frothy water's edge, I paused to twirl, to point my toes, to be five years old again and was greeted by myself, a mermaid ghost doing water ballet in the mirror on the thin morning tide. I smiled at my own reflection until she was swept out to sea...

Mounds of blackened sea weed littered the shoreline - dividing the hard cold surface of the morning from the soft sugar dunes of the night. I lifted a foot and sent a tangled mossy pile of it flying....watched as a bridal bouquet of barnacles, treasure shells and bottle caps freed themselves from the knotty web in flight.....

A few more steps and.....

Half buried and half alive, a billowing orange blob lay breathing, exposed and then hiding again with each lick of the waves. It wallowed, quietly gurgling and then gasping. It's lungs filled with water, and then it lay breathless and empty again. I crouched near, but not too close. And then with one steamroller roar, the ocean flipped it on it's belly....

"I'D RATHER BE IN BED"

Giant letters tattoed on it's fluorescent chest.

I drug it's water logged ugliness to safety, into the arms of the Sun. Lay it, flattened, on a mound of sand just high enough to be an island.....

I salute you, sweet stranger,

wearing those dollar-store words....

And once here,

flinging them off in a fit of freedom......

Because,

of course,

there's no place anyone would rather be...

Than here........