from I am a hammerhead shark. I make no sound.

An alternative to an agreement is squeeze, applying accupressure to cartilaginoid joints that give

under semantic duress. Pursue me across numerous divides, over chasms of understatement now

clothed in a subtextual, “common sense” racination. First I am blue and then a movement, a

future in song remanded to the stomach, a pair of milky eyes that refuse to triangulate, a

stereoscopic ocean floor.

***

***

When the shark burns because the sky is on fire and the ocean is that fire’s reflection, there are

squadrons of atomic outbursts that also rove the sea, old iron held together by the forces that

keep us from knowing and from inside. The world is an iron nut, and the sharks moving through

those spaces—both actual and asleep, both breathing and following suit—are always on the

verge of a great din. Quietly, they regulate a small manger inside the glowing horizon—how it

speaks up when not spoken to, addresses itself merely to the now clamoring past, catching a

burning reflection’s glow. And on the bottom is without any reluctance, of course, without

hesitation because it lacks dew and dew’s tears.

***

As a shark, I am only about the difference. As an engine made of sharks I do not pose questions.

Know only that a shark is hungry and its hunger is eternal, that there is a nowhere inside and

that the world is enough for lesser appetites, that the sky is on fire and I am on fire but blue and

that blue skin burns without smoke. Distance is a relative distance, always. This way bends when

that gun is fired, this wave transfixes that bed of nails, the ones you dropped with yesterday’s

hands. There is no daylight in the din, shark eyes are infinite eyes. An infinity of shallow gray

smoke that breathes and looks without looking when you swim past.

***

***

To resuscitate a shark, to slide two fingers across a serrated organ for “breath,” is to wake up

inside a starkly blue-lit room where the text written across torn cotton pages wafts in a circular

fan’s efforts. “This is not a page.” “Only you are here.” “You are only here.” As a shark, are my

eyes now made of jet, is this a sonic discourse that we carry on in tides inside our skin, is the

way I slide across the page a manner of approaching you at last or scoping out a possible meal.

Wake up inside a soluble skin, dissolving into the atmosphere, a nation’s rhetorical rain.