.                                             “No, don't warn me I know it's wrong
                                              But I swear it won't take long”
                                              - Yo La Tengo

“Relations are more important than the things they relate,”
your old comrade said, in the late afternoon session,
in that city behind the taciturn mountains, his hair
now colorless as snow, which came late this winter,

not unexpected, but a surprise none-the-less,
like an off-color joke at an increasingly drunken
party, filled with relations and old friends, who
had come from – but enough, this sentence is

to long already, and must stop now! But why?
Won’t it just be followed by other sentences?
And they will still be connected to the last.
But, again, why? Is everything connected?

Perhaps, yes, in the bigger picture, but we can
not always be in that position, must glide like
rivers, understand through concrete images,
cement our small innovations in place, and

re-enforce them -- béton armé it’s called, in France --
Oh! France! Land of Paris, capital of the 19th Century,
with its naïve progress, its precursors, and its
unconscious serenest seeds, rêves and nightmares.