they posess a certain indifference to salt water feed
– though it’s not just the words,
the complex sentences rolling out
like a Faulkner rough draft. the perpetuity
maybe. some underpaid scribe maybe
maybe with dreams of being a novelist maybe
went to college in an age when no one did
or maybe just maybe he was just a solid writer at school
and someone suggested he was the next Dickens
and there he was writing a manual for steam engineers
that may or may not be appreciated maybe
and maybe he was a she and wishing George Eliot
had had some balls to write under her own name
and here am I, reader of the future, sinking
forward in the past
smelling the near brittle paper before I start reading