once upon a time

Faithful, faithful, faithful. Samuel knelt by the oak tree in the snow. The year was 1987 -- the world was different then. Circuits were not yet crawling through the soil.

What if he wrote you a poem right there? He fights the urge to lick the flakes from the air. Samuel is faithful so he will not bend or else he might tear and out will come his faith. This is a problem; poems require flexibility, a certain carelessness about the joints. Impossible not to leak, even just a little.

When the world is pixelated, later, pixelater, there is a threshold past which it becomes impossible for you to tell yourself apart from the sofa and the window with the view, and your hand. Fortunately since feeling is first it is the last to go. You will know your hand on your knee even if you cannot see the distinction. And if you write poems -- if you write at all -- it will be like closing your eyes in the dark.

When Samuel closes his eyes now he see the whiteout and the tree swallowed up by the world come to meet him, years ago, and what happened next he knew then would change absolutely everything. Now he thinks of the line "closing your eyes in the dark" and tries to type where the difference is there is no difference at all

but mistakes his lap for the keyboard and writes until he feels such joy that he leaks out all this best thoughts on the floor.