They said you can taste poetry, it must be bodily before it’s intellectual. I can’t separate the observer from the observed because… because there’s no because—it’s mind and body, present and past, art and cognition, each a universe creating. But not separate. Separate, no, not at all.

He stops to tie a shoelace down on one knee hat backward with hair front-protruding on a bridge incline and it’s a warm June morning and I think we’re all just people, it’s not so overwhelming, we’re just a bunch of sad little monkeys with untied shoelaces.

Easy to think that on a warm June sun morn with the blues and the birds and the life around, windows open letting in thoughts of the paradox of behavior change, I recall, sensing innocence, like smelling it now takes me back then there to taste it.

Ah, and tasting takes me back. Back and back to the first letter A in Germanic alphabeticals, A like Alice and Alice is innocence. Alice’s innocence. The child days and dream, before things went A-awry and I said I’d gladly sell you some truth as fiction if that means you’ll let me make even the ugly stuff pretty because here I am now with nothing much to say without commas in the way probably because I talk too much and rhyme a little and no longer remember my dreams but the threat is there, always, filling, fleshing. The map, the territory. It all makes me uncertain, and should

but there’s that word again, disembodied. And me, us, all holding on, dreaming after a fashion, of all these simple sorrows, all these simple joys.