The Poet on the prawn feeds by not querying

Two mouths in the one brown water.

The first recites its menu to the sea — these fields, these types, this one door — and the sea, obliging, brings it only what it already said. It will never choke. It will never taste anything for the first time.

The second is a comb held open in the dark. It has no word for expect. Silt, husk, stray plankton, the glint nobody shipped — whatever the current happens to be carrying that hour, that tide, that luck. Same water. Same hunger. Same cut — one made before the flood, one made inside it.

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Every guarantee is a hunger you signed away. The contract keeps its promise the way a locked room keeps its air.

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When the promise-mouth is startled, something has broken — a wall showing its wet insides, a face bared that no one chose. When the comb is startled, that is called eating. Same jolt in the throat. Only the choosing tells them apart.

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I have read my own past like a form to be filled: went in with the question, came out with the question, answered, and nothing on my hands. Clean. Fast. Straight through the glass and never once snagged — which is another way of saying nothing there could reach me anymore.

Kin to the mark no index will return, the note I cannot ask for is the only one still capable of arriving.

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So: steep, don’t fetch. The leaf does not submit a request to the water; it lets go of what it is and the water goes brown around it.

Drift the old pages. Ask them nothing. Hold the comb open in the current and be found by what you did not seek —

the way luck, that shy fish, will not approach a mouth that is still talking.