specknose: named for the speck. he is the bigger fish and his mouth opens and shuts opens and shuts opens and shuts just like that. he, like charlie, is a goldfish.

charlie: a goldfish. but mostly white with a big red spot on his head. he follows specknose around and gets swished in the tailfin. they are very good friends and chew on gravel.

fish yawn. you cannot see anything inside.

i love my fishies.

I love sunshine. I love sunshine who gave me two fishies named specknose and charlie and also gave them a house to live in with two snails and plants (plastic alongside organic. winning combination). It is the announcement of a year.

smilesmilesmilesmile.

(from a poem I've been working on, idea generated from snake lore of northeast georgia)


Storytellers


A different imagination attacks the problem. Frozen snake, headless,
Singing. You cannot imagine how cold. Too cold to adorn
The eye pits, hold the jaw or inspect for hidden feet. Feet out of
The neck, the not-neck. You think you cannot hunt a thing
With song is the problem. You cannot behead the headless or the
Bodiless or the adorned. Song reminds itself of mouth, thawed,
Filled with skin. Mouth reminds itself of skin. The imagination
Strung through the problem, hung from a pole long as wide.
The imagination ornaments and will later burden the mantle.
Where rat is the arrangement is also frozen and itself arranges.

*****

i don't even know how to be today. i think i will sew a scarf. i need to edit but my chest feels too dead to actually be constructive. to give worth where worth was in some way missing. there are days like this. mostly i know them by how humid my room when i wake up in the morning.

a great number of things get to me. one is the feeling that i am, in some sense, living wrongly. that there are better ways of doing things but for reasons a b & c, i have either not identified them or have identified them and for reasons c d & f have not folded them into my life (schema).

that's just one. the others i won't get into because, well, i think it better to spare you. you're welcome.