from "Motes from the Underground"

Make love? But how? No amount of porno or manuals will help. You want fun then go to a funeral. When you transcend the form the gesture becomes clear.

Standing in the aisle on the 6:15 to Lowell. Highlands station stop. Popular stop. I wait to debark. I look down. Log legs flowering from a figure as reclined as one can be in these seats. She is large - in a lovely way. Health in the sparkled light a bright open face smiling into her open book. But my view is saturated with leg, that one grand appendage that thrusts up as it crosses its sister leg fairly erupting from the ... what is it called? ... not slit, no, vent. Yes the vent in her skirt. Stunning. I'm stunned. Maybe i'm thinking "vent", like under the water, under the ocean, miles deep, Marianna's Trench, deep sea vents, hot sulfur laced funnels of boiling heat gushing up from the bowels ... she's looking up. She was smiling, at something in her book. The smile will crumble in a nanosecond when she see's i'm watching.

I want to say "wait ...". I hadn't gotten that far. All that about the vents hadn't formed in my mind. Nothing about the giant white worms with flaming red mouths that rim the edge of these sea vents. None of this had crossed my mind. It's only now as a by product of remembering. Then I was blank, small, albino, in the utter darkness under the immense pressures of the many atmospheres of the deep sea world of commuter ediquette. My eyes? Blind, vestigial, dumb as glass. So don't yank me up to the surface. I'll explode and make a messy specimen.

The minute half life of her smile is evaporating. Melt down. I've got to recover. Think man, think. I conjure a smile of my own, a smile that is completely reflective. A parabolic smile that focuses her dissipating smile back to her returning her smile's energy. A tiny wrinkle passes like the faintest trace of a sand worm across her brow. In an insanely small fraction of that smile's half life she senses something. Me. But the smile of mirrors works and i blend into the background, invisible and almost completely undetectable save for the slight warping of the light (like rising heat). She sees me not and returns to her book and her smile unperturbed.