A shredding. A tearing of it.
Pointed finger stirring through it like a child does with milk skin
in a hot drink.
There the hopes, too blind to look into the eyes of, scurry away like frightened silverfish.
Who's? Who's are they? Surely not mine.

With each new step comes a fresh white pang.
A flash in the pan is a flash nonetheless.
Like a pulsar, it's quickly gone but lurking in the dark only to return in a decade.
Twenty-eight, twenty-nine, no, thirty lashes with the cat-o-nine, and in a decade, ten more.
Kept uneven, unpredictable--at odd numbers. All just to keep one on one's toes and back on one's knees.

A lifetime lost through "hems" and "haws". Condemned to a perpetual limbo where one sees, at the horizon, a receding wave that keeps pulling into itself
Stuck on the shore, we wait for it to come back only for us to realize that the sea has taken off too
You look down at the sand only to see that the kelp has wrapped itself around your feet and you're left wondering just how long it has been there and if you can still move at all

Laughter skips across the surface of the lake like a skipping stone emanating different eerie high-pitched tones that seem to echo the ghostly chirps of birds that have gone quiet and no longer fly. Nothing like one would imagine a stone's speech to be like.

A fine flat surface water-weaves itself once more. Nothing threatens to disturb it again. Not even bubbling from below. There are no thermal vents with life growing along their warm edges. No aquatic life beneath that unknowingly breathes its wishes which are carried to the surface and up into the blank slate of a sky.

Beneath it all is a cool concrete floor much like the ones in any backyard pool in the suburbs. Nothing of nature, of adaptability. Only neutral stone at its depths.