What the Sea Throws Up at Vlissingen

for Simon Vinkenoog

Plastic & cellophane, milk cartons & yogurt containers, blue &  orange shopping bag nets
Clementine peels, paper sacks, feathers & kelp, bricks & sticks,
succulent green leaves & pine tips, waterbottles, plywood and tobacco pouches
Coffee jartops, milkbottle caps, rice bags, blue rope, an old brown shoe, an onion skin
Concrete chunks white pebbled, sea biscuits, detergent squeezers, bark and boards, a whisk-brush, a box top
Formula A Dismantling Spray-can, a whole small brown onion, a yellow cup
A boy with two canes walking the shore, a dead gull, a blue running shoe,
a shopping bag handle, lemon half, celery bunch, a cloth net—
Cork bottletop, grapefruit, rubber glove, wet firework tubes,
masses of iron-brown-tinted seaweed along the high water mark near the sea wall,
a plastic car fender, green helmet broken in half, giant hemp rope knot, tree trunk stripped of bark,
a wooden stake, a bucket, myriad plastic bottles, pasta Zara pack,
a long gray plastic oildrum, bandage roll, glass bottle, tin can, Christmas pine tree
a rusty iron pipe, me and my peepee.

January 3, 1983 
Allen Ginsberg, “What the Sea Throws Up at Vlissingen”