Marking the paths again and again and feeling for the wetness as the ink keeps bleeding and tearing. The pieces of oblivion flaking off in chunks. And for what. For nothing. So the meat lies inert in the mouth. The tongue keeps finding its purchase in stabbing. Tracing the path of trying to scramble up to the rock with meat still in the mouth. Swallowing down the mixture. Trying to bear down around the blow back. Still jumbling around at the banks darting the ache of ought. The not nothingness pulling at the joints jabbing into the hinge of where something begins to form like a mammal. So lying there, dragged and tussled, snuffling at the fissures. The cells dividing just frame by frame. Hatching one by one. Notice where the lines can’t form into gills where the breath still hitches into silence. Scratching a scratch. Hobbling across the deafened herds with nothing but an extreme case of usefulness. Tucked into the fecund uneven in the bunches that squirm. Not nothing in the in the eventual flap of skin. Nothing like the suction. Just sucking up the dirt like mud, rounding up the sticks for a feathered tempest for nothing.

Feeling the mammal rioting away with no plot to locate it. Some here. Some there. To hold it in the soft part of the palm like a squirming fetid thing. Not nothing. A lid half closed. A science of forgetting. Shoaled together towards the mud. All the tentacles left on the shoreline. Not touching. Hesitant. How the appendages yearn towards motion. How the grasping goes. This tendency towards dismemberment a mutation to hold in the ligature. The very least that nature has to offer. Hefting up the body and back again. Squirming like prey. Charting a change in the membranes. Between nothing and nothing. A kind of twitch of hesitancy. A kind of trick of the light. Remembering to remember when swarms blighted the sour taste of the hot and rapid discharge of an easy target. Not nothing that’s a commodity of an gutting in the grimace. One here. One there. Not nothing. Pecked around the waste.