A Secant Query

Between Sap and Symptom

Wherein I hum a tune I made up as a child...

Between Sap and Symptom

The Arrival Times

I'm not in the military long. When they call my mom, who tells them she hasn't seen me since she kicked me out for being gay, I am sent home for being gay. Returning to the airport with no chance to reenlist, 2 month's pay, and full vaccinations, I call the boyfriend. Seeing someone.

Greyhound leaves me with time to read about the place I'm going. In a one by two knuckle listing, in a travel magazine at the airport the military sends me home through, it arrives in my life.

In a rainstorm of information twenty-four hour layover looks to leaves me with - the new palanuik book I leave almost read, most travel magazines in the shop I hole up in - that hairline post sits in me.

Those Two Months

In line for food, rank and file material I am given to study, I am informed, is to be looked at at all times. I relax my vision, see through, see it all, see you. What might you like, being here?

Song I hum doesn't bloom all at once. It's just a line, a willow branch of a thing. Becomes a log, rest, and object around you. Body's length from river 20 body length-wide, depth between ankle and five body lengths. River mostly two body lengths deep.

I Sit On a Log

See the river. Let her do her thing, as you do yours, as time, as I who'm space do time, feel free, slow the river down. Flow it back; forwards again. It's day, or it's night (the light's artificial). I find a way to consent to be this end of time (this moment, to every not consenting).

I marvel at present transestor miracles (you, but over here). I collect all the water (I never get the river to flow forwards again). It turns back into clouds, back into oceans back into shores, back into rivers, into my canteen, and, for a breathtaking moment, this river, me, consenting once more. Back. Upstream, spawning pool; fish by foot.

River floods from previous year make evident all this way is calibrated, automated, lived back, grey stones each a giggle a pffft the last time a held breath unravels, dawn, laughter, the rest of the chorus.

Still You (Yes Way)

Laughter its own creature shares a body with me. I float, suspended, solid, laughter this river, each giggle raindrop, harumph, one splash, that fog bank this exhale its mouth cloud. Note passes from above as sharp airfoil from nostril: finger-length, sapling. From tree it falls to lap:

(shit!)

I'm not the log, I'm not the river, I'm not this moment nor this one. Who're you, poor lap-sapling. Just starting to live, of air. From up here after sprouting, falling. To no-time (my ocean still forming); all water clean from space, back to plastella, never colliding with anything. But palmed, question-shaped airborne creature:

Panic-Stricken Care