everything is the center of everything

turn any stone

consciousness pervades

Having washed ashore, it begins talking to itself.

Maybe a shock wave from Atlantis? Maybe I was a last ditch cry for help from a ship wreck in the Arctic Sea. It's a delicate situation. Can't seem uncertain here, so just enough detail, but not too much.

Oh - wait – please don't put me on your shelf unread!

It kept going on, even as I carefully placed it on the shelf. And then it began rocking to and fro, as though grieved.

Look, a ship in here! Aren't you curious? Yelling will not help, only inflate my sails, bottle or not.

Then it began to wobble, side to side, like a casually dropped penny coming to rest.

Make you an offer – you choose the message. Tell everyone I washed up out of the Dead Sea, mysteriously. After a sand storm. I'd like to remind you that it's very bad form to kill the messenger, if not always unethical. You cannot take the wind out of my sails! I am an independent messenger. On the other side of the shoal we have our hall, the Independent Bottle Washers of America. We have the Roadrunner as our Congressional Representative. No doubt you've heard him: Beep, beep!

My choice? How impudent! A message that talks to itself must be deemed absurd, no matter what it says

THE EVENING NEWS

I don't remember a story where the person gets on his donkey and rides off in all directions. I hesitate to say donkey, finding it not too splendid. But that's what I'm given. On the other hand, it's rare to find a livable planet. Compare an airless world. On that scale, even a donkey is splendid. That part about all directions is marginally more difficult to assimilate. Or perhaps I am the donkey.

Metaphors are difficult to manage. They tend to have their own subconscious life, ready and able to take the reins, going off on their own. A donkey is not a hairless beast.

With such a splendiferous fanfare, we can rest assured that it's not a gold rush story. And somewhere in it another character might decide that it should be about a hawk cam, not gold flakes. A tension must be felt. Conflict must loom. There must be something to resolve. Evil must die. Peace must at last come to the donkey corral.

Sorry. It's all directions at once. Or to fluff a pun, it's about the OK corral. Alliteration steals away with bits of meaning, bringing all these to meet their maker, who might just decide, Bleah!

The gist of it drifts our way. What seemed like perfectly reasonable nonsense slips offshore. It starts going somewhere, say to a ledge under an I beam where there's plenty of room for a hawk's nest, adorable chicks. It begins to make sense. But no one really knows why. Why would any hawk choose to nest there? So it becomes more of a human interest story, perhaps subliminally resonating with the housing crisis, moving from there on out into the homeless population trashing city streets, getting involved in peaceful protests, but not too desperate because that would ruin the gist of it.

Maybe it should shift a little further – the stupidity of City Hall. The morphology of metaphors in the last analysis, if it were to realize . . . but it got lost.

How is that, when any direction will do? But it tied itself into a knot, ending before really getting started. Splendid!

It belongs in a field of associational data, correlations that statistically salivate, ivy clinging to a tower that, basically, is a grid of bricks.

It grows like a corral reef, living in borrowed water.

It challenges the Oxford English Dictionary, and the Rosetta Stone.

turn any stone