Relentless
terrible
weird inky impositions
of will,
somehow go
on pressing their
desperate fingerprints—
thousands
and thousands
after thousands of iterations—so
stiffly
and
dumb into
a harrowing ghost-
white
paper back-
ground radiation
of everything
that
never was—
until, positively
clucking
with rapacious excitement,
even the tiny
tip
of the tongue
of the
dog knows
you eat those
slippery
buttered noodles
after
work every
Thursday.