(The First Answer shall not become Member to any group in which anything placed inside the nostrils becomes holy.)

The Singing Bone of Implementation may become difficult to recognize. In the hymns of the cycling windchurch, a description of influence may be raised like a plate of snow, ragged edges softening, and eventually absent the surface of the subject's hand from feeling.

(These two things in one place, mouth juicing, or kissing, if you prefer.)

Offering certain rewards softened between the earlobe and the testicles or encased in the larynx of a breather known to be engaged in illicit whispering activities, and can be of considerable benefit to the selected miscreant.

(Neither shall The First Answer enter stockings of his ilk. For in this may be found the most common pattern of degradation encouraged by prevailing standards of shame.)

The knife claimed to be the wound. It doesn't want to be here either and cannot heal of its own accord.

(The First Answer watched you talking into the dark and waited, the empty glass filling with sunlight, spilling over. The First Answer considered that the knife does not remember the hand and prepared the sunlit jacket with the patience of a tapir and a story of hunger in which the stomach's bright wheel is rolling.)

Each day was attended to like the story of something inside that is told for the first time, again and again, thus lifting the unburdened body into the light and into the offering. What you know about time is behind you.

(The Engine of the Stoplight stopped at the scarring, a kind of observation.)

First Answer tells the story of how half-me says to the other half, How come we're not all here? He's holding a monocle as if it were the key to his sorrow. Squalls thrill the stoic air hanging on to its ragged gray cloud chevron behind the thought of curling up. The rewards of the inclination. You could possibly have me in the arrival. Sometimes in this house we're together.

(Said the half that was less than half and away. Said vast quantities of intriguing car-window trash. Said the throat of the hungry thigh reaching unopened. Said the bodies of nouns unarmed now and isolated.)

I'm not sure I understand how we got back to the farther question, General.

You're a grateful man, Corporal. There's probably a war in it somewhere.