i look up, staring with soft focus at a perforated drop ceiling. in this hot room i return to again and again, there are faces. i make them. i see them. they offer me respite.

i’d forgotten my ink drawn hand, the way i leave messages for myself, sometimes in tongues once familiar, sometimes wordless, marked, anticipating meaning.

i am told daily the same thing.

and, later i re-read chapters of not always so. yesterday’s was Letters from Emptiness. on the cover, Shunryu Suzuki’s face.