The night was a rich silken expanse ever growing ever reaching for the far shore of eternity, this night’s face painted with wisp-thin clouds obscuring the starlight glow; only yellowed blinking headlights fitfully illuminating the beach; harried vehicles on the roadway, lives all on display in the back windows - life in transition between life - speeding lives so close but so distant, never touching, no not ever touching, embraced only by the song of the sea its black satin water washing ashore, staining dark sand a spill of oil, the restless tide speaking in foreign tongue sublime. Perhaps speaking of love, loneliness, longing to the far off flag whose drawstring kissed passionately the hollow flagpole - a cold metallic heartbeat in the ebony darkness, and cutting jaggedly the darkness a long wound deep, a pier like lolling tongue thirsty for the drink of sea. It was blacker than the night, this pier, an ugly malformed appendage to the city whose insomniac lights reached not the atmosphere entrapping them. The night was silent and dark, such a severe purity to the sable air a lush cold against the skin, footprints in the black sand impressions like soot leading toward the inevitable. Life itself was barren here, in the darkest shadows of the beach. A tomb, this place, a catacombs for love lost - for there Love lay in repose beneath the pier, moldering wood pilings like the bars of a prison cell. There Love lay, her light extinguished.
