The 9.6 million followers who tune in to watch Miranda Kerr having her hair done on Instagram — for this is how models spend most of their time — were treated to a rather more interesting sight last Thursday: a black and white photograph of a whacking great diamond ring.

Across it was the caption “Marry me!” and a twee animation of the tech mogul Evan Spiegel on bended knee. Underneath Kerr had typed “I said yes!!!” and an explosion of heart emojis.

A spokesman for Spiegel, founder of the Snapchat mobile app, who is 26 to Kerr’s 33 and worth $US 2.1 billion to her $US 42.5 million , revealed “they are very happy”.

At first, the marriage seems an unlikely combination: a man so bright he founded Snapchat while still at Stanford University, becoming one of the world’s youngest self-made billionaires by 22, and a Victoria’s Secret model who was previously married to the Pirates of the Caribbean star Orlando Bloom (she allegedly had a fling with pop brat Justin Bieber, leading Bloom to punch Beebs in a posh Ibiza restaurant).

Perhaps the union indicates that there is more to Kerr than we thought. More likely, it reveals something about Spiegel — and the way the social status of “geeks” has changed.

Since Steve Jobs made computers cool and Millennials started living online, nerds are king. Even coding is **** enough for the model Karlie Kloss, singer will.i.am and actor Ashton Kutcher to learn it. Silicon Valley has become the new Hollywood, as moguls and social media barons take over from film stars and sportsmen not just on rich lists, but as alpha men.

Being a co-founder of a company is this decade’s equivalent to being a rock star or a chef. And, if their attractiveness to models and actresses proves anything, then being a Twag — tech wife or girlfriend — is a “thing”. Sources tell me Twags are also known as “founder-hounders” because they like to date the creators of start-up companies.

Actress Talulah Riley was an early adopter. She started dating the PayPal founder Elon Musk in 2008. Riley, then fresh from starring in the St Trinian’s film, met Musk in London’s Whisky Mist nightclub after he had delivered a lecture at the Royal Aeronautical Society. I interviewed her shortly afterwards and she told me they had spent the evening talking about “quantum physics”. A month later they were engaged. Their on-again-off-again marriage lasted six years before she filed for divorce again in March. Currently Musk, worth an estimated $US 12.7 billion and focused on Tesla cars, is said to be “spending a lot of time” with Johnny Depp’s estranged wife, Amber Heard.

Model Lily Cole dated the Twitter founder Jack Dorsey in 2013. Later she had a son with Kwame Ferreira, founder of the digital innovation agency Kwamecorp. Actress Emma Watson is going out with William Knight, an “adventurer” who has an incredibly boringly sounding job as a senior manager at Medallia, a software company. Allison Williams, Marnie in the HBO television show Girls, is married to Ricky Van Veen, co-founder of College Humor website.

Could it be that these women are onto something? Dating a bro certainly has its appeal. They are innovative: how else would they invent apps that deliver cheese toasties or match singles based on their haircuts? They are risk-takers who must be charismatic enough to inspire investors and attract crowd-funding. They may not be gym-fit, but they are mathletes who can do your tax bill. They are animal lovers: every start-up is dog friendly. And they are fun: who would not want to date somebody with a ball pool in their office?

There is a saying about dating in Silicon Valley: the odds are good but the goods are odd. Nerds are notorious for peculiar chat-up lines and normcore clothes. Still, if geeks can be awkward, that is part of their charm. Keira Knightley, complaining that Silicon Valley was all men in hoodies and Crocs, described how one gave her his card, saying she should get in touch if she wanted to see a spaceship.

One Vogue writer recalled a Silicon Valley man messaging her via a dating app, in which he noted: “In 50 per cent of your photos you’re holding an iPhone. It may interest you to find out that I invented the iPhone. More accurately I was an engineer on the original iPhone . . .”

Most promisingly, some guys are astoundingly rich. It is suggested Kerr’s engagement ring is a 2.5-carat diamond worth around dollars 55,000. She has already moved into Spiegel’s dollars 12m LA pad. Between his money and her Victoria’s Secrets bridesmaids, no wonder sources claim they are planning an “extravagant wedding”.

It might rival even the Napster founder Sean Parker’s $US10m performance-art bash. He married songwriter Alexandra Lenas in a canopy among Big Sur’s redwoods decorated to look like an enchanted forest. Some 350 guests wore Tolkienesque costumes created by The Lord of the Rings costume designer Ngila Dickson. They sat on white fur rugs and were given bunnies to pet. Presumably rabbit babysitters were on hand when the disco started.

If such fantasies inspire you to become a Twag, the great news is you do not have to be a supermodel to be in with a chance. Such is the dearth of single women in Silicon Valley that one dating site, Dating Ring, crowdfunded a plane to fly single women to Palo Alto from New York.

Be warned, though: guys are single because they are married to the job.

No wonder most meet their partners at college or work — the Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg met his wife, Priscilla Chan, at Harvard.

The Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom met girlfriend Nicole Schuetz at Stanford. Melinda met Bill Gates when, in 1987, they sat next to each other at an Expo trade-fair dinner. “He was funnier than I expected him to be,” she said.

Kerr began dating Spiegel in 2014 after meeting him at a Louis Vuitton dinner in New York. You can bet he was networking. Shortly after Louis Vuitton showcased their cruise collection in a Snapchat story. Last season Snapchat went on to become the biggest new name at NY fashion week.

If you want to meet tech guys, you might catch them at Silicon Valley parties, which is how the Uber chief executive Travis Kalanick met his partner, Gabi Holzwarth, a violinist hired to play. Or they might be schmoozing clients downtown in a swanky Noe Valley club in San Francisco or a boring Union Square hotel in New York. In London you find them around Old Street, aka Silicon Roundabout, in bars, at hackathons, or start-up meet-ups. In the day they are coding at Google Campus or practising their pitching in a co-working space.

Some tech boys date the old-fashioned way: on Tinder. Airbnb founder Brian Chesky met his girlfriend of three years, Elissa Patel, through the app. When I interviewed Instagram co-founder Systrom he admitted that when he had been single he had signed up.

Dating agency Linx — presumably a play on operating system Linux — is dedicated to making Silicon Valley matches. Amy Andersen set it up in 2003 after moving to Palo Alto and being “flabbergasted” by the number of eligible men. She claims her clients are “extremely dynamic and successful individuals’’: tech founders, tech chief executives, financier founding partners of large institutions and “tons of entrepreneurs”.

Andersen says tech guys make “fabulous partners”. Romantic and chivalrous, they write love letters, plan dates, “even proposing on Snapchat!” If you want to marry a tech billionaire, she says, “you need to bring your A game.” Her clients look “for women who are equally, if not more, dynamic and interesting than he is!”

There are drawbacks to dating tech guys. Before Google buys your amore’s business, he will be living on *** Noodles waiting for the next round of funding — and workaholics are dull.

Kerr says Spiegel is “25, but he acts like he’s 50. He’s not out partying. He goes to work in Venice [Beach], he comes home. We don’t go out. We’d rather be at home and have dinner, go to bed early.” Which might suit Kerr, but is not my idea of a fun.

You had also better be prepared to share your life. When Priscilla Chan miscarried three times, Mark Zuckerberg wrote about it on Facebook, while Chesky used a romantic trip with his girlfriend to promote Airbnb - uploading a picture of her in bed, with a note saying “f* hotels”. Besides all of which is the notorious issue of Silicon Valley sexism.

It has a chief exec-bro culture that puts pick-up artist/comedian Dapper Laughs to shame. Ninety per cent of women working in the Valley say they have witnessed sexist behaviour, 60 per cent have experienced unwanted ****** advances at work, two thirds of them from their boss. Whitney Wolfe, a co-founder of Tinder, took Justin Mateen to court for ****** harassment. Her lawsuit against the company alleged that Mateen, her former partner, sent text messages calling her a “*****”.

Spiegel has tech bro form. He apologised after emails from his days at Stanford emerged: missives about stripper poles, getting black-out drunk, shooting lasers at “fat chicks”, and promising to “roll a blunt for whoever sees the most **** tonight (Sunday)”. After one fraternity Hawaiian luau party, he signed off emails “f*bitchesgetleid”.

No wonder some women are not inspired to become Twags. Especially when you could be a tech billionaire yourself. Would you not rather be Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer of Facebook, than married to the boss?Read more at:http://www.marieaustralia.com/evening-dresses | www.marieaustralia.com/black-formal-dresses

The teacher wrote a question on the board
large enough to see but,
still hard to follow,
in black expo:

If each color had a taste, what would sad taste like?
And the girl with crosses up and down her arm
mentioned once,
'blue tasted like flat soda pop,
cold and a bit too sweet'

The boy with the hair running smoothly over his eyes
pronounced sixty four ways to say 'azure'
and each time,
he tasted the iron of the
hammer that his father had split his collarbones apart

and I cried for each story,
because the color 'blue'  always
tasted like brandy, heartbreak and broken nails

Bleary-eyed, an old man asks for change,
coins rattling in his hand. A woman
hands him saltine crackers across the aisle.
“God bless you,” he mutters, takes a seat,
and unwraps the plastic with shaking hands.
He smiles at her before she leaves the train.

Tonight, the passengers on the train
are surprisingly quiet for a change.
We are all staring down at our hands.
And then the silence breaks - a woman
cackles aloud to herself in her seat.
Her laughter travels up and down the aisle.

I overhear a conversation across the aisle
between a couple who’ve just entered the train,
and are searching for a pair of empty seats.
They’re muttering “the country is changing”
and they say they are afraid. The woman
sighs, and reaches for her lover’s hand.

I look over at a child holding her mother’s hand.
I meet the little girl’s gaze from across the aisle.
I see myself as a child too, but to her I’m a woman.
I wonder how often the little girl rides the train.
Does she long to see something else for a change -
something other than the back of a seat?

I notice a lady who has started dancing in her seat,
snapping her fingers and waving her hands,
bobbing to a silent beat. I imagine her changing
into a sequined dress and waltzing down the aisle,
giving everyone a performance to watch on the train.
I imagine standing up and dancing with that woman

and then everyone begins to dance with the woman -
we all jump up onto our seats
and suddenly we are in a ballroom, not a train.
We are tapping our feet and clapping our hands
to the music - the little girl across the aisle
is dancing with the old man who asked for change.

The train stops. We’ve arrived at my station. The dancing woman leaves the train. The passengers change and now there are strangers in their seats. I wave my hand goodbye to the little girl as I walk past her down the aisle.

What a linear experience
with a twisted friend  ?
Safety in solitaire set alone.
blowing away false dandelions.

Early
Late?
time won't wait and that's a lie.
Time,
flies by, and yet goes slow,goes fast
Time,
the last of the greats waits patiently.

The line of time runs straight but
what
if it bent like light to turn the day back into night
what then?
would scientists get ******* with the papers that they'd need to write?

Time and nuclear clocks make dreary reading.
Random seedings leading to the links they seek.while minutes poke and **** and leak into the atmosphere.
Time
so far,yet near enough to taste and wasted on the thoughts we think when in a blink, time ups and goes and how time slows the nearer we become to learning how and why things run the way they do.

Time,
and when it's through it starts or ends as in the blinking lights it bends,distorts and catches us quite unaware
and as we stare it waits and still is time,there is time still,time is still,one day I will begin to walk those lines of constant and of changing thought
but now
my fascination overrides of how time bides its time  and bends itself into my rhyme
I have all the time I need and yet have none
before I know it
time has gone.

Is it my counter-counterclockwise
mind wasting time? Elbows
on the dining table pulling my angel
hair into grid-like times tables.
I’m invested in this non-conversation
table. Ich liebe dich, mein Freund.
I’ve got commitment issues and four-ply
tissues for when my eye lashes start
peeling apart. My grandpa died in 2005
and I’m all but over it. I’m holding
his kite string, but the reel is almost done,
like VHS tapes rewound then fast-forwarded
to the good times. Power Ranger birthday
and everyone’s wearing dunce caps
with elastic chin straps ‘til they snap.
Snap! Snap! Snap me back to three-years-old,
and I’m singing in a Robin costume
‘cause I knew I’d always be second best.
I had an identity crisis around fourteen,
so I stopped buying sunglasses
because I found myself in other
peoples’ shadows. But now the only shadows
they’re casting are the ones from their headstones
and from the fields of flowers cradling
them like they once cradled me.

Fast-forward, I’m genuflecting in gym shorts
before myself in a mirror smudged with plum
felt. And I seem small compared to my life
spelled out in Expo marker markings.

Keep-A-Breast
                                 Apple
             OtterBox
                                                    Acu-Rite
    Dial                                                                Aquafresh
                        Oral-B
        ACT                                Garnier                                           Equate
    Hanes
On the Byas  
                            Rude
                                                        Toms
                                Dakine
                                                                 Acu-Vue  
Ponds                                                                                         Degree
  Preferred Stock    
                                    Mighty Wallet
                                              Hot Topic
                     Keurig                                        Dixie
                                                                                               Donut Shop
Domino

International Delight

                                 Peter Paul's
Best Yet                                                            Great Value

                                        Instagram
Facebook
        Snapchat                                           Yik Yak
                                                                              Forever 21

                Adventure Time
FSC                                     Bic                 The Poetry Foundation
             Staedtler                               Pilot                Sharpie            Microsoft
The Norton Anthology
  

                                                         Toshiba            Dell          Expo
Lipton  
Emerica
Anti Hero                                MOB                   Shorty's

               Bones               Thunder  
                                                                                        Shake Junt
                                                                                       Swingline
                                                                                      Pandora
Tommy Hilfiger

'                            Jill                Greg                 Ashley          Courtney

Judy
Bob
Janice                    
Shannon                                                                                   Kelly

Robert                                 Emily                  Jeremy      Darrin      Liza

Bill                Joe                         Dominic            Sean              James

Gav                             Jordan                   Tony              Eric


Christopher

Saying hello, again
Because to say goodbye
I'd have to trust that I would not
Say hello again.

And my silence comes in colors
Like drip-dry paint on the walls of my mouth
Tastes like green and yellow today
Fresh flowers that arrived late
And the yard working all shades.

I hate to stop
Picking back up where I left off is easier said
Than remembered,
No matter how many scribbled expo marker notes are left
on the dry erase boards of my closed eyelids,

Hello,
Again.
Care to dance this dance with me?

I couldn't give a **** what heat engines are.
My job is to tell a couple little snot noses to sit their ***** down and drink juice - it's easy and I love it. I couldn't give a **** about heat engines.
(I mean, aren't all engines hot anyway?)
But when I watch you kneeling in front of a whiteboard, drawing out diagrams for your coworker about what you're learning in physics, my heart jumps out of my ******* throat and slaps my computer screen like a raw steak. Not exactly a romantic metaphor I know, but it's accurate.
I never thought Expo pens could be ****. I never thought math could be ****, for ***** sake. But you do it somehow.
Everything about you drives me nuts. Looking at you gives me the biggest feelings I've ever felt, and I get scared I'm going to explode. Really. People say stuff like that, but it's true - it feels like I'm going to explode like some sort of adorable grenade.
I don't know what to do with myself. Ever.
Go to church - yeah.
Get my degree - sure.
Go to work - totally.
But with myself? I have no ******* clue.
For one, I don't think I can come hang out with you at work anymore. You have a certain amount of professionalism to maintain, and I am a threat to that - in the most violently affectionate way possible. I am so close to tackling you in a bear hug and spooning you right here in this classroom. I never considered how painful it is to love somebody. In the best ways and the worst ways.

Now you're sitting in the armchair next to me, the ****** little coffee maker filling the air between us. You talk with your friends and draw  and type into your calculator and occasionally glance at me and every time you do anything, I  . . .  I can't. I can't even explain how it feels. You are the antidote and the virus to every part of me. Loving you has been the most exhilarating and most miserable experience of my life. Loving you has taught me how agony can be sweet. Loving you has changed my life and will continue to change my life.

I've lost interest in almost everything. School is school, work is work, books have become boring and friends have become obsolete. You feel the same way, and your Mom thinks you're depressed, but you're not. Neither of us are. We're so ready. We're so ready for something new.

I have never stared at someone so shamelessly in all my life. I could listen to you talk about heat engines for the rest of my life.
That's the plan, anyway.

Three children brought
Onto earth
Three children did
He rear
Three children made
From His own genes
From stardust we appeared.

From the foundation
Of our lives
He sent us to school
Possessed of his intelligence
And HE was NOT a fool

Great aptitude for reading
This is how he taught
The books my father gave me
Produced much
Higher thought

We went to places
far & wide
Hawaii was like heaven!
We went to Montreal
For Expo '67

Various religions
We were to understand
We went to see the kivas
In the native lands

We went to search
For arrowheads
We looked for
various traces
Of native habitation
Appreciating other races

He tried to teach me math
Using the flashcards
But I was into writing
So he let me be a bard

He loved the
arts & sciences
He loved agriculture
He grew up
deprived of it
So he taught us culture

We took the piano
He helped me
make a start
Writing my own music
He encouraged my art!

I'll read him this poem
We will then discuss
How he has the  
GREATEST legacy

For my dad has *US!

one time
i was in the third grade
mrs. jernigan's class
i answered a question on the board
i dont remember the question but the answer was he'll
and i wrote it on the board w a smelly blue expo marker
and smiled so big when i walked back to my seat
trusting every person who told me i was smart
and everyone who said i was pretty
and then everyone
in mrs. jernigan's third grade class laughed
because instead of he'll,
the contraction that would grant me power and status
in mrs. jernigan's third grade class,
i had written
hell

and then the smelly little dude in front of me, keith,
turned around and said
"your ***** are too big
for your shirt"

The mysterious answers eluded me.
Friends left on bikes,
Went to Expo,
Had backyard tents.
I stood, palms pressed, waiting.
Then Marlene and Jimmy died
And I knelt before the maze master,
Looking for an exit.
All, I am told, are answered,
But the lines of communication
Seem crossed.
Does he get the ways of man
As well as we get the ways of him?
I supposed your prayers were realized
When you left,
Yet the same rain and sun drenched us.
I should expect a summative explanation
When I get
My commuted response.

I write on the tops of wooden desks,
press the tip of my pen deep into the wood
and scribble out inane hearts and Lee '15 and
dumb poetry that curls over the edges of the desk
on uneven lines like a disaster waiting to happen.

I scrawl words and designs
on the crimped edges of a TAZO tea packet,
crumpled in my pocket,
and rip the paper apart slowly,
watching the lines of pencil split and diverge
and never meet again.

I ink my fingers with expo and sharpie,
let the tips shine oily black in the light
then quickly press them
onto crisp printer paper, peel my fingers
off and count the dips of my identity
in the grooves of white and black.

I smear the side of my hand with black,
wipe charcoal on my forehead
as I sweat in dimly lit studios,
hunched over my stool and eyeing the x-acto knife
from where it lies on top of a box of glue sticks.
Beside me is a cup of black TAZO tea,
that has steeped for over 4 hours and is already
cold.

When I leave, it is past midnight,
but the sky is not dark yet because
even with only the light of the stars,
I can see sharpie on the flesh of my thumb,
and charcoal dust fills the crescents of my nails
and someone has probably already
crossed out my name on that desk in room 216
that I sit at for English,
and in my pocket there are 2 more packets of tea
that I need to drink because

it has been four hours,
and my tea is already cold.

timid grows fuller and fuller by the minute
    when silence flounders into something where a smoke ceases
and a breath of the first utterance begins.

             the waiter strides with a bottle in each hand,
takes credit for where it is not due as a disservice to an errant beast
      hiding behind the drone and the machine.

why does it feel like this behavior is a love for turmoil?
   you fill this room, as in all rooms where I have been in
with you, with a multitude of disappearances

put in heavy scrutiny by my place kept in a similar stock
  of presence.

say, when you jolt out of the couch and leave to excuse yourself
    to catch a phone call or secretly take photographs of everything,
I watch your impression on the weighed down cushion
   and witness it rise as if getting rid of your frame.

the ticking of the clock is as guttural as any tongued word
  of defeat. a slow demise of minutes could be a thread
  to haul out an immense hour. These things do not grant anything.

       the waiter comes back again with a smile dangling on his
mouth as if trying to tell me something, a question or an assurance, was it?
    is it? I hurl a word and hope someone will catch it,

and that when someone has the lost and tender word, I wish the figure
   to be true                     unlike any metaphor

        of how the moon grazes the concrete and somewhere in the vastness
a star falls to the nearest fire hydrant, or a shaded tree, or near a motel room
   where two people are *******, where another soul meets a soul,
      where underneath the peculiar awning of a towering building
           you    almost said the world was yours and as you return to
         the place that has you completed,

you are altered by it just as much as it has already changed you,
    beginning with the swiftest sense of you, yesterday, and who you would be,
today, perhaps much more beautiful than the last time I left and found you in the sheer contestation of the abandon

         like a line I wrote at the back of a calendar that I was supposed to give
to you with a couple of post-its
    so you can keep track of yourself and your vivid undulations
  
                 and never the possibility of afternoons where we could both
dissolve in pale sunlight, drink as though we have been thirsty for months,
                    laugh through the overcast and umbrage of delicate trees,

                                                    willi­ng to be silenced by the squalor of old desire
    in exchange for a new life but not so much promise in there, as there is still
               compromise in a sullen exchange of entrails where in one afternoon
of a  newfangled life, I may stumble upon you
        again in the crisscross streets of Makati, or while slurring in speech in Cubao Expo,
         to all the places you have filled with your tiny disappearances;

                        to God or machine who/that, keeps you here, stilled into this
  wondrous life, where absences shuffle and you
                        are the only one unharmed.

I don’t have an actual **** of a clue who I am anymore, I’m in a constant bizarre. Thought expo-rational, friend reducing path to anything but me. All too confusing. Especially bruising, that self proscribed *** kicking I’m inflicting. I’m illicit for a hand to befriend in the upmost fuckedest place a guy can. It’s like I’m running outta sand. Trying to catch the last grain. In the jar that’s encapsulated my life from birth-till now
But I’m present for lack of luck and the clock ticks on in gravity’s kingdom of ****..

how to whistle while washing ***** dishes
The island of we, the sumerians

sixty times the four fingers,
three count point
knuckle one,
knuckle two,
knuckle three, see it counting
to ten in base sixty

humm a little whatifery whistle,
what if, we need more
imaginary units to finish the proof, thus
we instructed
were
we not? Prove all things are not your
imagination,
we are in agreeing mind state, joined
at the bottom most
maximus grave ityness, the force
we must suppose
flipped us off as not a chance,

let it be. Me, my mind, I find, rests
in peace.
with no anger remaining prime motive,
get even,
get back, grow up, settle down, learn
the secret said to be revealed

as reversed veiling, un veil, one of seven,
as the dances were advertised,
hawkers, spy the curious child,
wink, a thought, think kid

seven veils and tied to a cross, with no
malice of fore thought,
this was here, in that hat, I thought was mine,
a mind field, experience, not

commonly taken from the sheet let down,
from the heavens
to the roof of the Khai Vinh fishnet factory
verified center
- glimpse
curious tracker on a water buffalo,
those look like oxen, may-i- those are the sign
sought,
like year of all the oxen out and free,
ball as bulls
give it a twist
imagine
castrata tata tooeee
the pace of evolution without the power
pens I use in my war with power
edgers, bubble
slicers, other wiser geysers, orange
is oranger than any carrot, if you knew orange,
as William and Mary institutes the truth color,
the other people's orangest of naranca
edge lit
ledgends told to begin sending the dancing
muses, as the sun is singing oranging
arranging
so much
so little, this touch, too light, to feel, fffixes the glow

green florescencing bit, you think it down
to scales,
we see. We now beings seeing and sensing below
the frequent measure mental device
we may imagine imaging in our shared timespace
- glaring screen
projected, light, and shadow, sent.
Sentiment, seeing Mayfield, Kentucky, and
knowing
that place was like, like
yes, the ideal Mayberry, USA, as depicted
in the youthful vigor of old Henry Ford, and
the dime guy, what'sisname, famous rich
dime giver, we all marched in his memory,
in the year of our Ford, Rockefeller, right
1954, oh, the allegiance, total troth, all
under god, and the trusts on the money
at the top of the eye,
watching featherweight angel judger try
-yy'alto lift ration, al flow
expo
exponential compounded interesting times,
by golly, it could be organzied
to see, perfectly strange,
as you
b n  -i-    odd number, at the end, I bet.
stand and ask what line is this?
--------------

Some, somewhere, a point, at least
per haps may be made
plain as through nothing,

Hours pass.
Mother jiggles pills in her cupped hand.
The coloured stones
clink
clatter
clank
as in the palm of a beady-eyed buyer
at a mineral expo.

Hours scrape by
like the pills mother chokes down
her parched throat.

The sands prescribed by physicians
and pharma-cartels
shape mum like a Gobi dune.

Mum's morning marbles
are washed down with gulps from The Nile.
The Yangtze sits chilling in the fridge
next to bottles of Po.

I find her at noon
recovering pearls like Ama divers
crunching them like seeds
and moaning that the sea
is dry.

I count the hours
Mum can't call to mind.
I count the pills for her
and the hours wither by.