15 december

you feel as bland as a stack of pecans--

or walnuts, perhaps, stalking awkwardly (ten minutes late) into the cardboard-cutout high school poetry reading-- catching in the warm copper light of so many floor lamps and so many warmskinned bodies. balancing, as you are, on one hip two trays of froth-white sugar cookies, nonpareils curled up precociously like so many chromatic ticks.

And around he turns, commenting in a friendly and noncommital way on your lateness, and your boon, and you creak out some painfully dull catch-phrase like, that's right, or, you bet! and see, you can't faites attentionne for more than an instant! see, he has turned towards that limp-faced poet (the vaguely yellow light spilling out beautifully over his white shoulders, like burnt syrup; like teeth stained by too many cigarettes), toward the lifeless teabag of unfortunate high school poetry.

So you cleanly arrange yourself three rows back, tracing perennial patterns with your eyes on the back of his pralines-and-cream hair; you miserably diffident acquaintance, you dull grey stack of walnuts.