HAVEN’T NOT WRITTEN NOTHING TO SAY?:

I open the notebook, The Alwych ‘with the all weather cover’,
nothing. No words, just a stain where altitude squeezed the ink
out of my pen, a Lamy, white in remembrance of the Pentels
I used for decades until they stopped making them. They were
perfect, never leaked on planes & gave me at least two weeks notice
they were on their way out. I was forced into using fountain pens,
now I prefer them, like the way the nib rides over the surface
of the paper, the thick & thin of lines as they loop & how they
sings to my synaesthetic ear.

See the stain on the page, a duck’s foot shadow crossing three feint
blue lines. I close the book, notice a small piece of sticky white
something adhered to the cover, take a closer look. It’s a piece of
security wrist band from Bratislava, a memory of goods times &
sheltering in the back of a black Mercedes at the height of a wild
electric storm. I open the book again, hoping the duck’s foot will
have transformed into words, nope.

(K)