haibun || Sheila E. Murphy

Here is what I do (is what I am). I take the driver's test online, first time in six years, only this time in the ether, near a cup of coffee, strip searching the internet

for what it caught today and let go as reflexively as though it were a fisherman.

And what I am is what I may not do again: urge motivation, when the feeling

is not mutual. All feeling has to brush up against repeat signs that would  onfiscate a freedom once proposed. The only people I'm uncomfortable with are those who do not fathom what they have become. Is what they are the same as what they do? Only their atmospheric subcommittees know for sure. A surety bond becomes a coma that belongs to someone else. A comma that beleaguers English teachers who would rather be in Bali for a time. The metronomes around us seem sub-par, likely due to makers. Marks upon the sides of buildings tell us

we are only children who will be identified as wearers of a signature gold watch.

Today someone I love called me an adult. I don't know what I do (is what

I am against the grain). The rain pressed into service all across a continent. The

fervor and the whipsaw and the citizen's arrest prompted by all play no work.

Everywhere the continent abides is how we follow compass points as though we liked the voice of GPS Jermane. Now quizzical repudiation tells one person she's a different model from the other. We thought we would keep a hundred of this brand before our sentences ran out. She was a mood all by herself. The recollective playthings that endowed her faultline with a strip one might accuse of interruption. Here is what I was, the verb to be alerting me to take back each prediction and live something quite unplanned. I do the things I threaten I would say if you failed to intercept my reflexes from selves of worn out nickames of one syllable. For now the course is not best practice, merely promising, yet on the list. Her mania is how I threaten to survive. There'll be a downside any day now. I am hunched within the basement cabinets, holding a short candle and a dish. Can opener right near the metal cabinet where these soups have lived as long as I.

Unsyncopated outcomes, the anticipated curve of vowels once bounded by their

consonants, a broth, an engine, the failure of cease and desist

Sheila E. Murphy