Its eyes, long since pecked out by hungry birds,
nevertheless exuded a certain calmness, along with offal and rot. As he lay
there, hopeless, beside the rock-pool, slowly decomposing in the midsummer’s
heat, he possessed a strange beauty. Well traveled, no doubt, his fur matted
with the saline air of the coast, he possessed the aura of a soul that had been
through the motions. That had scaled great heights, loved, and lost it all.
There was scarcely a second between
the sun being blocked out and it reappearing again with a ‘thud’ as 40k of rock
met with skull. Any notion of poetic grandiose ebbed away, as a spider-web
trickle of some ambiguous liquid carried little floats of pulp and membrane and
parasites towards my feet.
RIP Pauly.