It still feels strange to be human. I grip this as if a hammer.
Sparks fly, ripples of knowledge radiate the river's's verge.
Flumes that breathed life into minerals ended
with fossilized plastic polluting the River Styx.

In Paris, Alberto had long ago smoked himself
into "A horrible (atmospheric) sickness." So I
started walking, ankles turning, knees sailing

the river's rocky shore, sun-inflamed, mountain
peaks ahead, water rushing to the salt it craves.
Everything's flowing. It hasn't rained for weeks.

 

 

 

plastic: See, H. Leifert, "Microplastics Are Turning Up Everywhere." physicsworld.com/a/microplastics-are-turning-up-everywhere
Alberto: A. Giacometti, sculptor.. 1901-1966. A heavy smoker, he died from lung cancer.
I started walking: "In the winter of 1974, filmmaker Werner Herzog made a three week solo journey from Munich to Paris on foot. He believed it was the only way his close friend, film historian Lotte Eisner, would survive a horrible sickness that had overtaken her." W. Herzog, Of Walking in Ice. New York, 2007.