what are poets but vultures, circling for the choicest meats

i am sitting on the beach with you,
where the land bleeds off at the seam into the water,
and the water bleeds black into the night.
you are just a silhouette,
silver backlit by the easy moon as you say,
“i know it’s cliché, but those boats on the horizon make me feel lonely.”

i have felt this same aimless longing
standing in the velvet of the waves
as the foam snapped out along the sand.
why is it that you and i and everyone before can feel this
here at the sifting of the water?
in the rain on a window upon waking.
in the smoke of a cigarette stitching out from your hand.

there is truth in that which is trite,
a clumsy filmy light groping along what it illumes;
yet we dare not speak words so bare and bromide,
we confide as an aside or beneath the night
that moments in our lives are significant.
we are all a crude poetry,
the long days, moments of metaphor sliding past before we can hem them to us.