Frost Bitten

This dark brick back yard, and grassless dirt,
stalkshadowed that evokes itself
while I wait in its hollow.
Shackled, that heavy-shouldered
garden hose draped like a plastic boa,
green on the cold metal neck of a fencepole.

Stone, ice breathed
in and being in screeches its grains clean
down my throat, sweats and dampens in the
alveoli of my lungs, and recrystallizes minute
Frost being not in
cold lungs and crunching dirt.

Tufted waste land of ground, garden sometimes, with an
unsettled slope, like a curtain torn
down and left untouched,
to inhale itself on the floor
in the mysterious flattening process,
What slab is on you pressing your grains
so uncrumbled close, stones
barely meeting your
surface with their turtleshell faces,
painted dustmottle marmoreal maps
until the rain will wash them bare
and spiteless merciless thaw bleed the frozen wound in new old channels.

Not interrupting the cold labor of the flayed
garden unmoving under rusted leaves, baredirt
and broken buckets staring up, someone's breath
limns my mind, condensation slacking and tense again
all as one,
and with the next beat breath is veiled and gone.

I would rather freeze to the spot 'til
it come back, or break.
Sun will boil me away.

I'm Through Messing Around with Snow

I fucking hate fucking snow. I'm exaggerating, I wouldn't really do that, but I do hate looking at or walking in snow.

Snow, I hate you. Go. No, don't look back, just pick up your mess and get out of my driveway. And don't even think of taking off with the salt.

My sidewalk is gonna stay clear goddamit.

Don't get me terribly wrong, snow is fine for flinging around and running through, getting thrown about in by friends and such, making into forts to take cover in, frostbitten and sweaty, redfaced with exertion and frost whilst hilarity ensues. But I don't want it clinging to my boots every damn morning when I walk to the subway station or go out for groceries. Let go dammit, or I'll get the shovel. That's right.

Telling Stories

There is fiction in the space between
the lines on your page of memories

There's a convection, hot and cold, forgetting and knowing: it carries little true and false things up and under again. A surface, pocked with doubts and diving questions, watery surface of a story. Why does it always come back to water? He remembered stories of cloning and stolen nuclear material, told in a lab, and him as an eight year-old paranoid of someone suctioning off his DNA and injecting the stolen chromosomes through the membranes of some foreign egg, him being uncompressed and reconstituted as a frog or some other misformed hellishness. Not that he was to be put off from science: conversation turned comfortingly soon to hyperdrive, artificial intelligence, the measurements and prospects of bones.

Lost in a churn of slides - Can Animals Think? Pannonian Shoreline: 12 MA, arrows weaving to and from Africa - and clay models, scaly questions, a boy floating somehow towards a distant want, islanded just off-path of a mean current that plucks and tows and tosses out to sea. Where is he?

Soaked cardboard boxes with inscrutable labels in black marker, letters two inches high drift by like brown kelp. A flock of tickets, practically a book's worth, to nowhere he's heard of slide by on the warm wavering surface of the water. Brown wrinkled lillies bob by like toy boats. He wonders about long and deepmawed fish or sea snakes. Where he is is insensible, dark and oceanic beneath his neckline, only the theoretical land of those tickets to remind him - where did they go?

Some years later and only after learning to live off the odd flotsam and when to trust and distrust the whims of waves and flows, he washes up on a bed of sand, sleeps on top of where the sun has laid down on the silica grains, gets up with them sticking to his back.

A yelping dog is waiting for him, it runs back and forth from him to some indiscrete whiteness laid on the sand. The body of a fish, same as he worried about in the drift earlier, gapes blind through milky eyes. The dog has not touched it and wags its tail as it watches the boy watch it. He reaches out to feel the dried fish, breathless afraid that it might snap at his hand, and finds its deceptively dull skin still damp and slick, and its gills twitch and flutter. Terrifies the dog, which bolts and then runs back, wagging, and bolts again. The boy follows, finds himself at the edge of a water hole, black and thick as the sea and with creepers draped into it and swirling into its depths.

Falls asleep there, the dog in his arms, warmer than the night air, and awakes wet and gasping, canine nowhere in sight, island inconceivably absent, just a dream?

There is fiction in the space between
You and me

Potential Difference

Grainy shades of wanting, quantified
sloping pain tracked by a needle
knowing the empty pull of
copper veins, stretched staring
for bare electric motes in chorale
straining over the break
in parallel - blind buzzed and piled
one on the other - and air strengthless
between, carrying nothing, stretch
over the needle, there, how much?

Empty potential, stored cold battery
high and untouched tight wire humming
nothing, but over the break, invisibly
the reach of far-blind dizzy flakes
scatters in my blood, (the needle
shows it), finds the graded span
between that flush far-afield
snowdrift-lonely huddle,
and the surge
home.


It's been so very long since I wrote a poem about physics. This one explains the idea of voltage in clear words we can all relate to. Ah, electrical potential difference, you make my heart beat and always will, what with the sinoatrial node and such. Been a long time since I've written any kind of poem, though. That's the downside of knowing of, and in some lucky cases just plain knowing, so many better poets, it can quiet you down a lot. I can always shrug it off on account of stories being more my thing. I finished a new one. It's probably too big to put up here, I'm workshopping it and then probably trimming it down. I'll cut it from 12 pages to a paragraph and then post the key sentence stand-alone, like an verbal extreme closeup.

For Anyone I Missed

Those of you without email addresses properly stored on my contacts list take this:



Basically, if it sounds like fun to you, you should come.

Be râh mioftam

Any of you who speak Farsi totally understood that. It means I'm hitting the road (literally, even - it's cool how English and Farsi have so many figures of speech in common). Of course, Farsi has nothing to do with any of this, except that the final exam for the course made me delay my departure for Italy.

But depart I will, now that I'm done with school. Done for the next three weeks, anyway.

Huh. That seems to be all I had to say. Carry on. See y'all soon, I hope.

Numb as a Statue

't'ain't nothin' special
when the present meets the past.
I'm always takin' care of business,
I've paid my first and last.

I'd dearly like to uproot this insomnia. This latest round has been nice enough to leave me, inconsecutively, ten hours of sleep in the last seventy-two. That is, about five hours total on Friday and Saturday nights, and last night, none. I've been known to say I had "no sleep last night," meaning a minimal amount. This time, though, my brain did not for one minute flip to an asleep state. I gave up at 6 a.m. It was already bright out. Somehow the fact that the world was beautiful regardless was a consolation.

I've just come dripping from the shower. I feel like I might pass out, gratifyingly, from exhaustion. I do not believe this will come to pass. I'm still too busy thinking.

It's an endless rivulet singing through my head that keeps me awake while I contemplate the backs of my eyelids and the conscious acts of breathing. I'm reeling through an enormity of things I'd wish to fix about myself. The inability to shut up and go to sleep, for one. Quietnesses, loudnesses, things too vague to explain or too specific to mention. Things I didn't do or shouldn't have. It's not unlike me - in fact it's happened much more than once - to walk too far after turning down a ride, to make things difficult, walking away from what was waiting for me, for no reason other than to wander longer and worse. I would - have often, come to think about it - more probably press into blank forest than follow a path laid before me in untrodden leaves wanting wear, as the man said. I must want wear too.

To put it shortly (as if I haven't blown that chance already,) the kinds of things everyone stays awake thinking, sometimes.

Actually I want either to drop where I stand or wake up. Or really, both.

I want to count back down from my enormous number to zero and lose those superfluous things, find the truth of the basic state, close my eyes, exhale indefinitely and glide un-knowing through scattering secrets.

Does any of this mean a goddamn thing?

I don't care if it's superficial,
You don't have to dig down deep.
Just bring enough for the ritual.
Get here before I fall asleep.

Letters from the Bowels of the Beast

I've made my opinions on Scarborough and the satellite campuses it knowingly harbors and abets as well-known as I could without actually getting out of my chair. So, though coincidental, it was appropriate that my mp3 player was singing the songs 'Never Again' and 'Road to Nowhere' as I made my way back into those obnoxious halls. Okay, it turns out that first song's actually entitled 'Not in this Life,' but the point still stands.

Whilst I roamed, the device started playing Pink Floyd's 'Time,' which was suitably bleary, but I was hoping that The Innocence Mission's 'Prayer of St. Francis' would shuffle to the top of the playlist.

The song itself is more than serene enough to reorder a mind scrambled by wanderings of the campus's cynically self-doubting floorplan, even without the beauty of the prayer the music surreally intones, whose words I managed not to actually hear for the first 2 or 3 years I had the song. More to the point, though, the ridiculous UTSC building, which seems to be the bastard stepchild of the Bauhaus and Baroque movements driven insane by a comittee, could benefit immeasurably from a bit of the Franciscan philosophy of simplicity, purity and humility, which has in the past been applied to architecture with great success. Maybe it's just as well I didn't invade that reactor core of confusion with such antithetical principles. I might have opened up a black hole.

But that's an aside.

The building itself, and the elliptical logic of what frazzled intellects framed its fearful asymmetry, deserve nor demand no further comment. This time around I actually found my target - the library again - fairly expeditiously. The key is to start by giving up. If one can relinquish one's worldly thoughts of coming to any point, one reaches a cartographical Zen and finds the forgotten destination in the white space between thoughts. What is the sound of one map clapping?

I passed a couple of sights along the way - the load-critical books are still ducktaped steadfastly to their shelf in front of the library's no-access porthole, and I also came across a curious black metal door, wide enough to force a bison through sideways, that opened into a room no bigger than a closet. By and large, though, I was focussed, and I reached the library in an amount of time no more than triple the theoretical minimum, orders of magnitude less than it took me last time.

I was there to pay for a book I'd lost as part of the wacky adventures involved in my last Scarborean expedition. The staff gave me a choice between paying a flat $140 fine and a second option that cost only $30 but necessitated an unthought-of third trip to UTSC. I was sorely tempted to just splurge, but that annoying work ethic that, thank God, only rears its studiously well-kempt head for sidereal or esoteric matters, won over.

Thus, satisfactorily, concludes my second and hopefully penultimate schlep through the Wastelands. I wonder how Chris and Bettio put up with the daily commute. I burned easily two and a half hours on TTC property, though the second half of this time was cheerfully filled with writing this on the back of a scrounged bus shelter rent ad, and the first half was occupied by various acrobatics of Farsi grammar - an activity at least 5 times (minimum) more exciting than it sounds. Also, it's nigh on 4:30 now and I haven't eaten anything all day, and I'm feeling oddly unhungry. So that's pretty much been André's Fantabulous Tuesday.

The comments things are gone, though the guestbook's there same as always. I'd like to think there's a couple people out there reading me silently and without compulsively scratching responses into the internet. I'll do things like that sometimes. Was that last sentence ambiguous? Not that anyone should take this as an injunction from signing the guestbook.

Hot House

"André, check out the roof, it's steaming!" says Dave.

"What?!"

"From the sun on the rainwater," he says. I go see.

Sure enough, when I pull open my shades, a gliding mist is rolling past my window, over the roof which is an arm's reach away, and off every other roof in the neighborhood, dissipating as it crosses over the edge. It's quietly a stunning sight, in no small part because it also provides my first look at my absolutely gorgeous surroundings since I put up that curtain at the beginning of winter.

But I realize as I take in the view that those vapors fringing the rooftops couldn't be caused by the evaporation of water in the sun. For that to be, the roof would have to be heated to 100 degrees Celcius. I assume that heating roofing tar that much could be dangerous, and a quick glance at the EPA Air Toxics Website yields the following:

Roofing tar is composed largely of polycyclic organic compounds (POCs, a subgroup of PAHs (never mind)) that have melting points between about 65 and 175 degrees Celcius, depending on the tar's hardness. The benzo(a)pyrene used in roofing tar is a very nasty chemical when airborne, with concentrations of 1.1 nanograms per cubic metre considered significant, and is found to have chronic, reproductive and carcinogenic effects in concentrations of 6 ppm (80 mg/m³) or higher. Heated enough to boil water on, even if the tar were still well below its melting point, it would pose a severe and long-term health risk to people living in the area. Also, our roof clearly can't possibly be boiling hot, or we'd have more immediate problems than tar-related cancer.

So while I look at the scene my brain riffles through my Physical Geography index and realizes that the mist is actually there because our roof is colder than the air passing over it. By cooling the sun-warmed air slightly, our damp roof causes some of the airborne gaseous water to condense into drops of suspended liquid, which make up the fog swirling by my window. My handy index further reminds me that the same thing causes mist beds over lakes and blanks out mountain passes when chilled alpine air sinks down into warmer valleys. Of course, the transfer of heat from the air to the water on our roof causes some of evaporation too, but that's invisible.

Cool. Also beautiful to see after it rains on a warm day when the air is saturated, the temperature just above the condensation mark.

- - - -

Edit: Well, I wrote that a little while ago and took it down because I wanted to edit it more. And I just did. So y'all know, I kicked the ass out of my Physical Geography exam. Finally done with school! 'Till summer school starts! Temporary yay!

I need a title for this post.

Oh, good, they've rolled out a movie about the Crusades. Sorry, a Crusades movie. Heaven forbid anyone should think that Kingdom of Heaven is meant to teach anything about the Crusades. No, much like a baseball movie focusses intently on the emotional theatrics that can be justified (or not) by the backdrop of a hard-fought series, and is minimally, if at all, concerned with conveying such salient details as the infield fly rule, so promises this historiesque comedia del'arte to be not so much about history as around it. Or in front of it. Standing, waving and doing cheap cartwheels, directly between the audience and the actual Crusades.

"I'm not fighting another holy war here," says the director, Ridley Scott, "I am trying to get across the fact that not everybody in the West is a good guy, and not all Muslims are bad."

"I find your lack of faith disturbing."

As touching as those words are, the trailer for the movie does indeed seem more than a little preoccupied with the idea of holy war. Also, casting the damned elf and surrounding him with blazing fireballs and speeches about honor and steel does little to diminish the sense that the movie wants nothing so much as to make a sensation, any damn sensation. And then there's Saladin, decked out like a Dark Lord of the Sith.

My first reaction to the concept of this movie would involve a lot of question marks and explanation points if it were to be transcribed. I wrote a post on it yesterday just after seeing the trailer, so of course it was junk and I didn't put it up. It generally turns out better if I can wait a day and see if I've calmed down at all, but I just watched the trailer again and I'm as angry as I was the first time. Thankfully I'd already articulated most of this post by then. But look at that. Honestly, look at that. It even has hacky rock music. And a giant ripoff of the Helm's Deep battle sequences. And check out the end of the trailer, when, also just like in Lord of the Rings, "they're here." Only instead of evil orcish hordes, there's Muslims. But it's all in the name of history, to show that They're not all bad and We're not all good. Plus they're filmed at a distance, so you can't see their faces.

So, you know, it's okay.

Running Story

Twice now, in three days,
I've gone running,
   paved Broadview giving into
   a bridge, dirt path beaten
   beside steel guardrail, and the
   cul-de-sac: supermarket parking
   lot.
And twice seen you, too big to be
a hawk,
wings, spread translucent at noon,
panning gold slow circles, preying above,
thrown wide, implicated, sublimated.

I bruise my lungs traversing
the distance you elide in one-tenth my time.
Bird, what injustice they do you,
with that silly German commandment:
"Be aloof."
Lufttiere, you are nothing of the kind,
watcher, mixed like a worm into
this earth.

I come to the bridge strutting that ravine,
Bridle cables, spans and rivets,
     tree river tree trail wind traffic.
Each foot dives for ground
that pushes forward, up,
us
I breathe,
implicated, supplanting
I cannot rest.

---

Quite simply, I run because I don't know how to pray. To quote Little Mike: "Stupid soccer players! Why would you run for a purpose when you could run endlessly?" I made good time today, and saw that bird again, and this came of it. I tore an old notice off of a pole ("Important meeting September 30th, 2004, in the Library - babysitting available.") as palimpsest on which to scratch the first draft, which was awful, of that poem. I don't usually have drafts, first or subsequent, but on the run back I pretty much rewrote it in my head.

Our dishes aggregate themselves on the kitchen counter, almost like coral growth, forming increasingly precarious columns. Now, to satisfy my domestic obligations, I must wash enough of them to at least knock a couple feet off the top, thereby ensuring ongoing stability.

Hit me Over the Head. Hard.

That time of year? Laid in bed all last night, seeing the walls, the sides of the bed, the white sheet I use for curtains, cast wan-bluish by what moonlight it caught, feeble sail. And I did not sleep. Acknowledging the inevitable morning, dredged myself up from the useless bedsheets to boil and strain myself a pot of coffee. Wrote my exam.

Came home. Laid down on sofa, pulled the heavy artificial-fiber blanket over myself and let it be stiflingly hot. Balled up a piece of blanket to be my pillow, and stared at the living-room wallpaper, which an obscure part of my brain said to be the color of yeast.
And-
Did.
Not.
Sleep.

A Very Slow Crisis of Faith

A raindrop or two, unheralded and smacking wet tiny starbursts on skin, or on paper - teardrop pops - can be the small precursors of a flood, surging white and breaking. Sometimes. And what about when those overloaded drops begin to land thput! on the heavy ground, drip off of leaves and cedar fans to spatter on the soggy and tangled earth and stay there, not vanishing into the soil, not running off, only soaking more and more.

Will you realize the surface you stand on is only the top of a saturated aquifer, sopping earthy sponge, or not? What about each tree, barken column of water, each solemn blade of grass, rare clover, these tiny succulent leaves, olive-skinned on red stems, a reservoir so deep around you once you begin sounding it. Are you - is one - awash then, suddenly flooded, only by the acknowledgement of what one knows, the reality of a raindrop? Or a tear?

It started raining outside while I wrote this. In the ultramarine light of afterwards, calmly, the rock wall and concrete steps, edged with light, and the flake of sky I could see, looked very different.

Spelling

"Saying "color" in Canada is essentially a spelling mistake whether it's accepted in America or not, and I expect profs to know better."

It's most definitely NOT a spelling mistake. There is in fact no accepted standard Canadian spelling. The Canadian Press (CP) style that is fairly prevalent in technical writing (and under which, it's interesting to note, "geese" is not a word; rather, that crowd of brown-drabbled birds is a flock of Canada goose) contains an unpredictable mixture of American and British spellings, like:

British: -our words (honour, colour, endeavour), -re (centre, theatre) and cheque, grey, jewellery, pyjamas, storey and sulphur. And American: aluminum, artifact, jail, curb, program, specialty, tire, and carburetor. A Canadian would watch a television program, as in the United States, but would read the programme at a concert or theatrical performance. These conventions are generally theorized (without much surety) to have evolved by historical coincidence and circumstance, on a case-by-case basis without any overarching logic.

I'd say Canadian spelling is basically a very subtle creole and that's great. Honestly, that's how languages develop. If this kind of thing bugs you that much, then if you consider that 2/3 of the world's current English speakers are non-native, and that all sorts of English dialects are popping up and bending the language in various directions, this fact would probably, as we say down South, really stick in your craw. Another related point is that much of the supremacy of English among world languages is due to its wilingness to adapt and incorporate, as opposed to, say, French. English has about 500,000 words. The next-largest vocabulary is, I think, about 50,000. We can use any word we want. I don't know about Life Science kids, but we English students pretty much all think this is great.

And please, it's not like 'American,' 'British' and 'Canadian' English are different languages! Spellings should be standardized in journals and newspapers for ease of editing and copying, but these are the only benefits such rigid treatment accords. Some profs, including the teacher of my primatology class, require that their students use the American spellings (and here I might note that these differ depending on what dictionary one consults, much like the Canadian ones but to lesser extent. I mostly use Merriam-Webster because they kick a high quotient of ass), because the main journals of their fields are printed using these spellings. The world is very interconnected linguistically, and failing to recognize (in any sense of the word) the major spellings of a word outside of one's own geographic region is kind of silly.

I don't know why people can get so territorial about spellings specifically, but try googling it, and read some of the polemics people have posted, and then ask yourself - whether you be American, Canadian, or otherwise - why you can readily accept such a word as "google" as a verb but put up an honest-to-god fight against an arrangement of letters, slightly different from your own particular spelling, that has been used by millions of people for a very long time, nearby.

I don't really care what spelling someone uses, and in that I'm with most Canadian academic institutions and hosts of international conferences. I just wouldn't like it if someone started to get rhetorical with me about the spellings I use, (which are mostly American: that is how I learned to write), because writing is pretty much what I do and I don't want anyone else to be pushy about how I "should" do it, regardless of where I am, unless there is a valid reason concerning the specific task at hand, such as that I am writing for the Dictionary of Canadian Biography. Which I did. And it was kinda cool, despite the fact that the research I had to do for it was so very boring. When the 1931-1940 phase of the project is published, you can read my entry on James Henry Fleming (born 1872, d. 1940, and by all accounts a rather bland chap of some ornithological significance), and reap the benefits of my academic endeavor.

Fin.

Try to Believe

On second thought, I've decided not to take as a tangible metaphor the refusal of a revolving-booth turnstile to allow me to pass, but its permission in, seconds after I left to walk to the other side of the station, of a friend.

What does the turnstile open into? The Heaven bus? What number is that? I tend to go around on foot alot anyway, I know the city from pointless wanderings down pointless streets.

But I've decided, on second thought, not to take it that way.

I'm walking amongst small frustrations of all the things I've failed as yet to become. Little pieces, margins, and the untended peripheries of my life, wanting a center that has shifted beyond their access. But there's something more in the picture and it's good.

A moment of that confused and cloudy knowing that can almost always only be clarified in writing passed over me, and I composed a poem. We will see.

Try sometime to go find the song "Try to Believe" by Danny Elfman. It's not the Danny Elfman you know. It's still raucous and to some extent unpurposed mayhem, but also some very different things. Now I'm the sort of person who doesn't trust any happy thing wrought by an individual over the age of three unless it also has somewhere in it a sadness mixed in - and I'm not cynical in that way. The opposite also holds very much true: things never are even close to being all bad. Well anyway, that's pretty much what I like about the song. It could have been another dismal ballad, but instead it acts differently and is this big, loud, dancing song. What I like about it is this person who feels so immensely unworthy, shrugs, and says, well, I don't care, I am going to try for grace. More or less plainly just like that. It's inevitably a little cheesy, of course, but a hell of a lot better than the trucksfull of "serious" songs that capture so much attention.

Anyway, this is really just a thought. The sound card on my computer is dead.

If I Had My Way . . .

If you leave a bowl of milk by your back door, very small men will come to do your typing.

Is there a frustration worse than spending all day trying to write something and coming up only with a sheaf of mostly blank pages, each one but slightly marred by unusable patches of penscratched notes? Yes, but that's more than enough for me.

But here I am writing a post instead of tomorrow's essay. It's been one of those days when nothing seems right. You know the feeling when you can't stay or go, think or forget, like being underwater, knowing that if you inhale you'll suffocate, but you can't hold your breath, either? I'm supposed to write but I can't read.

I'm to compose fifteen-hundred words on this:

Fabrications

     As if to prove again
The bright resilience of the frailest form,
A spider has repaired her broken web
Between the palm trunk and the jasmine tree.

     Etched into the clear new light
Above the still-imponderable ground,
It is a single and gigantic eye
Whose golden pupil, now, the spider is.

     Through it you can see the flash
Of steeples brightened as a cloud slips over,
One loitering star, and off there to the south
Slow vultures kettling in the lofts of air.

     Each day men frame and weave
In their own way whatever looms in sight,
Though they must see with human scale and bias,
And though there is much unseen. The Talmud tells

     How dusty travellers once
Came to a river where a roc was wading,
And would have hastened then to strip and bathe,
Had not a booming voice from Heaven said,

     "Step not in that water:
Seven years since, a joiner dropped his axe
Therein, and it hath not yet reached to bottom."
Whether beneath our senses or beyond them,

     The world is bottomless,
A drift of star-specks or the Red King's dream,
And fogs our thought, although it is not true
That we grasp nothing till we grasp it all.

     Witness this ancient map
Where so much blank and namelessness surroud
A little mushroom-clump of coastal towers
In which we infer civility,

     A harbor-full of spray
And all the loves which hint at love itself,
Imagining too a pillar at whose top
A spider's web upholds the architrave.

What do you think?

It's not much of a word count, although that's because the teacher gave us exactly two days to write it.

I've got nothing. The poem is a spider web. The instant I try to grasp at it it sublimates into a few clinging strands of nothing. The slightest probe or attempt at finding out what it's about disrupts everything in it - I can't trace the strands.

The eye of the spider web, the weaving and reweaving of our own perspectives, the depths of the world beneath and beyond our sight and senses, the Talmud and Alice in Wonderland, and all the loves which hint at love itself.

I have nothing.

Hate Week

Recitation

It was very complicated, even as it was simple.
One day she was in a crooked box of a shanty
chattering between pots and pans.
Mercury hands flowed and set on a pen.
Set and sprang.

Eyes unlidding old countries, scanned,
gaped
while the mercury hands brought the flying stylus
breathless across a new-known path.

In a quiet home and the land an open
and restive question, she, shy
hands sandduned on a warped woodplank tabletop.
Ocean sussurating outside
like Mercury, gasping.