not a bite. a sick and bent syllable, an oath taken tragic and rash. not even a drunken louse’s swollen stitches, a strong note held on the peak of Known Rock, not a partner’s trumped hand nor silvery fetid fish skins, not a village-ragged dog, a forced and muddy filth-stream climbing the top of my old boot--it will soak me--not this. not three days of sea dreams in a burnt white hospital bed. not a song. not a woman. no black-berries, no. not any wild freak-will.

nothing much to tell, but a tale of love beat-bloody suffocated on the ocean’s floor.
the sea, worse than cold-blooded, chills shine from every man’s sunken

death-greed. like boring sleep its patience flattens thick across a traveler’s means.
there is nothing to do but travel and so it is easy to be cursed. the sure story

hides in the telling, any child can see, in the once-upon-a-vile-road, in thus-our-golden-
heroic-ends, all the middle-rest lovely lovely useless.

music. and scenery shifting behind them unnoticeable. we’re alive they say and this is fuel. moribund rancor. vicious diction. it’s a game we don’t agree on the scoring. the generic thrash wildly, the neutral screech wheelies. one corner slacks and rounds to fulfill the spheric plan. slogans fume across the field: intuit this. bastardize precious in ’04. sicken it. miniature powerhouses fuse the air and dictate hail, rain—this is the proportion. we’ll wait for intricacy to weave us anew.