At work, on no paper at all

Names for sensations slip out then slip away again. I've been awash in words for the past few hours and I'm making a habit of it; I suck them in then spit them out again without too much thought.

I saw a dead duck on the side of the road today. A mallard duck laid out on the kerb like one of those old oil paintings of the Fruits of the Harvest. He was soft and perfectly, wholly intact in the way only birds can be. It occurred that birds must be dying all the time but you only rarely see their bodies, or comparatively rarely given the number of birds and the number of bird corpses I've seen. And I looked at the small birds flying over my car, wheeling and diving with the kind of integrity and wholeness only birds can have, a little differently. Their bodies end up crumpled and riddled with ants, they soak and disintegrate in the rain, like trash.

Thinking it again another sensation shudders through me but the name is too quick, I don't catch it and I'm floating on a sea of words, ideas I look at passively. I suck them in and spit them out again, I suck them in and spit them out again.

Amen, amen, amen.