This body of ours, which we cherish so dearly, will turn into a corpse that our friends and family will only want to dispose of as quickly as possible.

Here the destruction is subtle, and there the body is torn. Here the breaking is perceived, and there the dead unaware carry their putrid remains. All trade in filth, carry their filth one to another, all walk the streets as though the ground did not recoil, all stretch their necks to bite the air, as though the breath had not withdrawn. The seed bursts without a blessing, and the harvest is gathered as if it were food.

And when we're worn,
Hack’d, hewn with constant service, thrown aside
To rust in peace, or rot in hospitals.

unused body now dusty, dry, unsavoury

It is disgusting — Why must we have bodies?

All these men with their corpse-like faces, in front of us and behind, driven to exhaustion, emptied of words and will....All these men laden with earth, who, you could say, are carrying their own graves...

When Kamala came in, she dismantled our border and threw open the gates to an invasion of criminal migrants. We're a dumping ground. We're like a garbage can for the world. That's what's happened. That's what's happened to our ... We're like a garbage can

The ocean refused to be still; it took more, claimed more, and retreated less but paradoxically the hungry sea left behind more of its unwanted children, its vomit littering Scorpion’s little patch of beach-front: a seagull’s skull, uncapped beer bottles, horse scat, empty packets of cigarettes, the left foot of a size twelve shoe, a dead army of used condoms, and an old deflated football.

The tide goes out imperceptibly. The boulders show and seem to rise up and the ocean recedes leaving little pools, leaving wet weed and moss and sponge, iridescence and brown and blue and China red. On the bottoms lie the incredible refuse of the sea, shells broken and chipped and bits of skeleton, claws, the whole sea bottom a fantastic cemetery on which the living scamper and scramble.

Dead we become the lumber of the world.

This is the place where bodies are their own signs.

We mean are so weak. Our bodies betray even the noblest of us.

City Point is so beautiful, she says. In the night they cannot see the garbage that litters the beach, the seaweed and driftwood, the condoms that wallow sluggishly on the foam’s edge, discarded on the shore like the minuscule loathsome animals of the sea. Yeah, it’s something, he says slowly.

The shore is a place without seed, without nourishment, a scavenged death place. It is the wasteland, too salt for growth, where the sea puts up its dead. Shored seaweed does not take root but dries and piles, its pods splitting in the sun, while bleached land plants crack and turn to bone. Yet because of being a nothing, a neutral place - not land, not sea - there is freedom on the shore, and rest. There is freedom to search the nothing, the weed pile, the old wood, the empty shell, the fish skull, searching for the speck, the beginning - or the end that is the beginning. Hope and desire can rest there, thoughts and feelings can shift with sand grains being sifted by the water and the wind. I put my bag down there one evening and rested, leaving a way for the nothing, the nothing that can become a pin-prick, a stirring. I took warm clothing from my bag and waited through the night for the morning that would become a new beginning. (Roimata, chapter 1 p18)