River and Her Man

I, a witty human,
buzz at the surf.
It, a muscular river,
paws at the shale.

A mosquito and a hippopotamus,
we live up to the limit
of each other's worlds.

Applying tiny forces
in highly specific ways,
I call myself
sophisticated.

It roars in ascent
and in retreat,
ever outward facing.

It does not choose.
It is the most complete
embodiment of its own
possibilities.

In a boat, I row across it,
drawing a line
in the extended now
of my inner world.

It whispers
directly into my dreams,
from beneath,
at the softest part of my mind,

rolling against my
least-known shore
and doing what she
always does,

shaping me in ways
my clever brain
will never comprehend.

The Sonic Slice

Imagine, then, another world, layered over this one, but separate and distinct, a slathering of peanut butter over tessellating pieces of cheese.

The first, you already know; things there take the form of mass, but in the second, things take the size of their sound in the first.

And so the mosquito, who is small and ugly in the first world, finds itself a large round ball of warm fuzz in the second, carrying with it a static charge that makes you shiver.

And people would be tiny stick figures, drawn by children, with giant mouths, and we would all be wrapped round the immense ticking of the clock, a giant metal cricket, breeping from the upper corner of the empty cubes we live in.

And when we walked, our heels would explode to the size of planets as they made contact with the ground, our Jupiter talons then shrivelling like party balloons as they flew up and returned to earth.

At night, an insomniac would slide into the three millimetres of space between the splashing, groaning merry-go-round of domestic appliances and the sudden roar that blasts through the city like a laser bolt, probably a motorbike in the first world, but in this one? More like a run-away jet-powered crocodile!