This is it Buoys and Gulls

A rocky shore on an overcast day. No one around.

You can hear the sound of rusty metal buoys klanging that long ago broke loose from the danger they were marking to a new danger. They have drifted wherever currents and storms took them because the new danger is everywhere. The information carefully painted onto them decades ago is now just noise—barely visible chicken scratches—allowing them to carry a new message.

Klang klang klang
Danger danger
Klang klang klang
Bring out your dead 

The ghost gulls are here, as they are every other day, whooping and screeching, scavenging for foods that no longer exist: McDonald's fries, potato chips, hot dogs. Ghosts can't eat, but they can still feel the knot of hunger in the belly.

Squeee, ka-ha ka-haaa. No one comes here anymore to throw us french fries. The phantom bird issues a bitter squawk and wheels away, hoping that somewhere else there might still be people throwing small pieces of donut and pizza.

Gulls were never very bright, and ghost gulls are no improvement. That irritable bird has been up and down this coast, from Venice Beach in the south to the Haida Gwaii, just short of Alaska, and she's never seen a person yet.

It's a melancholy scene. It might seem poetic, or painterly, or even cinematic, if it weren't real. Since its real, though, there's no one here to see it, and with no one around it can't seem anything. To whom would it seem? What eye would assess it? For whom would it resurrect certain memories?

Given enough time, the buoys will sink or wash up on the rocks. Even the sea will forget that the gulls ever existed, and there’ll be no more ghosts. And that will be that.

Listen here

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