I began to speak and spoke not, and the words stuck in my throat flare now like a poem, this one I write.

I open and close the book again and again. I don't find a few thousand mouths in me, like the thousand mouths of a river in a far away country, I need to write this song I began to and forgot, helpless

I am, unable to find the words to pluck as fruit from a tree or words like unsteady planets wobbling in their orbits or words that simply fall as snow falls softly in a dark night, soundlessly.

My words are hard: as a rock, as me, or the lines that etch my face, useless words. I need words as fluid as flags waving in the wind, as fluid as a laugh,

a silver fish travelling up the river of my blood, of a woman dressed in dreams, that beat their wings around her as they take off like birds into the evening sky, across the blankness of unfilled sheets.

Will you bring me, few such words?

2002:12:12 01:00 Atlanta For S.B.