I’ll be like that Indian girl with the wrinkled sweat-stained white Jack Daniel’s baseball cap and the dirty fingernails who held her hand, palm facing out, across her eyes, so that I wouldn’t exist. Maybe she's not crazy.

No profit or loss, no equity statement, no policy, drag it out and say I really don’t like it, the way words lose their meanings. Babble-on. What ever whatever words. I wonder about the hidden lost depths in words like “knit” and “knot” and “know,” “write” and “wry” and “wring.” Get around it. Twist it. Delve. Linguistical spelunking. These things keep me up long after the trains in the yard, early or late between the darkest hours of the night, are done clanging and locking and thumping and whistling in their linear love.

A grey old man with white hair stood under a young blossoming cherry tree. White blossoms fell in the bright sun. He stood shoulders hunched, face drawn into wrinkles from years of worry and joy, and he watched something that could have been a hundred yards or a hundred miles away that I could not see. His gaze did not flicker, he stood long and quiet and I wondered at the past worn into the soles of his shoes.

My bottom lip split and I taste blood even though it is not bleeding. That scent is like sunshine, hematite, the ocean. This body of mine desires to slide through water.