Some of them gallantly performed allegrettos, but more often the festive gustations aurally dined upon their patrons. The most renowned of our poetries, Empedocles marched his from the banks of the Salado River, the southern element, that of Barbieri's ballad, continuing on to Tom's cruelest month–the time of rivers. The poems, composites of those occasions, were concocted by old salts, now hardly remembered. Yes, it was a feast, for Tantalus, of such duration and excruciating clamor, as accumulations of rhymesters whose inked vanes vainly spoke encircled Leucippus, the most lucid of them all. Out of your last rose fled his particles, into the air, towards the silence–that other voice–the one that is true poetry.

Yawning all, lost, who read us in literary contiguity agree that Manning is the true traitor to poets, not you. So go on. A toast to your anima tea, persona-free, like Rodo's parabolic Gorgias. Two hours until you flee, and it floods, all sides in that far-off sphere of your schoolboy years–and that stack of books face-down, next to Nancy at The Galleon. As you saw it Gorgias always gurgled, never twittered, like Aída's canaries, your mother's aunt, or Klee's machine. And he was paradoxically Sicilian, of two lands, the southern element.

"Clearly," Jonio fired back, but I prefer the clarity that comes from a misdirected second singular person–a you twice translated who becomes an I speaking to himself in a vale of other things.

An hour left: finish the tea, and then in despair, in so much despair, collapse.