Walk With Me: Poetry, & Fearing Men on Lonely Beaches

Amiable seaweeds sluice against wet legs
Drape crisp like dried flesh against fence wires -
rusting steel hopes to restrain those careless types.

The ones that would disregard the reason why the fence stands between them and the fragile dunes and declare:

but it is hot, and I needed shade!

Tiny purple molluscs stowaway on the overturned rafts of cuttlefish
The tide will rescue them from all this.

A kangaroo once catapulted from scrub to cold sea, chased by dogs - the joey drowned, caught in wet fur.

Three container boats hulk their way towards Port Phillip Bay as a cormorant flies in the opposite direction, towards the remaining Apostles

She can see the rust on their vast sides from shore, thinks of shipwrecks and hundreds of packing cases washed up
Men coming in to claim scrap
Lug it up the cliff steps, heaving and panting as if to prove something or make dollar or two.

There is a man that follows her along the beach, cock dangling flaccid.
Furious, she lifts her phone to take a photograph.

Do lonely man ever find lonely women on lonely beaches?

The camera trick works - he waves, retreats and disappears into scrub
She has tried it before, last week, when a man sat on the stairs smoking cigarette after cigarette.
She wondered about DNA traces on tobacco stained fibre.
He saw her take photographs, asked if she likes plants.

The oddness of the question had made her queasy at once.

She walked by with fake steeliness
Heart thrums against bones
Imagines being the kangaroo rushing waterside to sacrifice something living.

Not everything threatens.

Tiny mauve flowers & salty leaves tremble in the hot sun
Skinny lipped grasses look more at home here -
Both give way to footprints - they cannot take photographs as warnings to back off.
They burrow into sand footings at the mercy of sunburned limbs
Board covers and towels cover succulent leaf.
Do such intruders imagine they are picnicking in a more welcoming garden?

Bees swarm even here. Sweetness in saltbush.

In her mind she kicks and punches and screams.