what you get is what you see

Last Port-of-Call

Tug-boats lie at crazy angles, scuttled across the sandbars of a grassy tidal flat.  Hermit crabs creep from their wormholes in the mud like cockroaches, one enormous pincer always brandished threateningly towards the bird-filled sky. Massive ribs of sun-bleached timber mark the collapsing skeletons of wooden freight-barges.  Those time-softened bones are held loosely in place by hand-made nails rippled with rust. Steel decks of tug-boats exfoliate in layers, a sunburnt purple-red skin.  Such torn and egg-shell-frail surfaces mirror the mortality of every visitor.  Thin gray headstones name the buried dead of 1810, and 1830, in the old cemetery beside the boatyard.