There’s a spot I faced as I slept, where a heap of stones receded into a jumble of details I didn’t bother to make sense of at the time, and as I glance at them again I feel a memory come on, a dream of a black-streaked mouth in the stones, that spoke dream talk to me along the wind. I remembered the voice, but not in the way I normally remember voices. I didn’t hear it in recollection, but my memory started making vocalities at me and it was the affect of the voice that it partially imitated; distracted, sexless, neutrally old, talking off at an angle and to itself, but I was meant to overhear. I only overheard it speak. A strong definite sound, but it trembled. It was a death’s bed murmur, words maybe addressed to death, or through it, by a dying speaker. I get away from the beach fast, and as I walk the stiffness goes a bit out of my foot.

This broad bit of path seems to have lasted longer than it should.

*

Oh look another one of my outdoor cafés what about that. A handsome girl and brave asks me what I want and goes inside to get me whatever it is I’ve ordered. Everywhere, the same thing. I see mouths in motion on all sides. Incessantly in motion, on all sides. There’s another; and now two more have joined us. They eat, and their jaws work the food around among the teeth, between the jaws, pressed this way and that so that the different kinds of food find the teeth specialized to destroy them. The tongue does this, and also churns saliva into the food, so that everything tastes like saliva. Although the tongue naturally tastes, while having no taste of its own to speak of, not that I’d notice. I watch this or that patron lifting a cup or glass to the mouths they come here to honor with this fine food and drink, and the mouths stretch themselves out toward the cups or glasses, reaching out to meet them before the hand has finished bringing it near, as the eye judges. These people, like me, are marked for death. But not entirely like me. They can run.

So much strain and muscular labor involved in absorbing food. I’m exhausted just watching it. But above all there is speech, incessant speaking, where the inflated edges of the tube are stretched and contracted, knotted and unknotted, ripped open or pressed shut, flued and drummed, hammered and gnawed. Licked. That tube has two ends. To the far end goes all ignominy, and to the fore end all the glory, hymns of praise. Her lips were lovely. The swollen ring at one end of the tube, fastened to rings and riggings of muscle.

All these sounds. It’s exhausting.