Civilians eliminate communication as if receiving their degradation is a privilege.  Time compensates for the lapse of company by allowing entertainment to infiltrate consciousness, sequencing the blood from a frown to itemized nutrition, listed like movie credits, vying for affection from dilated tongue spurts. 

Bum-Lick-Jane wipes the spittle, preserved where her wrinkles rotate from a smile to a wink, onto the back of her hand. She’s holding a Styrofoam cup in her other hand, bottom of which is littered with change and lint. She shakes it as a man saunters by, he stares at his shoes and studies speckles of dirt, decorating the knot, made of his white shoe-strings. 

‘He’s ignoring me.’ She thinks. ‘I don’t blame him.’ 

A poet lays on a park bench, watches a gaggle of geese penetrate the sky holding the shape of an arrow. 

‘There’s no way to describe this…properly…’He thinks and directs his focus to clouds, shaped like the limitations of his imagination. 

Bum-Lick-Jane used to play tambourine in a folk-punk-band. She remembers the beats each time she quivers her cup, but it’s the silence of their rejection she hears the loudest.