at first: the suspension of

disbelief. then, comparison – the compulsion
to equate it, this image's spectral nonsense, with something

else; make it lithographic, reproducible.
and so: try fog taking shape – playing at

art – that night on the way back
from the party when you were drunk, but not

too drunk, and near the sharp
decline of the water's edge

traipsing the gravel road that lined it: the less
populated end of the harbour. that's what it's like. or,

perhaps, the shape and seeming
density of exhaled desire (a sheer

fuel spewing: leaked from
wherever, whatever it is, inside you that

has burst) breathed onto
the windshield in the cramped boudoir of a father's 88

accord. that, on the night when, although you'd deny
it quicker than the split that

was your first time, it's the nervous december
air outside – not you – that does that

to her nipples. yes. these both and more; other
memories, too, share

something – resemblance, congruency – with it,
the cloudy scaffolding they insist is

simply your hand.
but these, however, are the facts: the knuckle – on

the film, in your hand – is displaced:
fractured and away from its normal metacarpal

syntax. and the twinge, the
dull ache: these are instruments of artifice. all

bits or pieces awash in their
respective museums, fleshy or synaptic. broken or

discarded – adrift – in that
sticky – sometimes sweet, sharp – human cocktail.