"Houses were knocked down; streets broken
through and stopped; deep pits and trenches
dug in the ground; enormous heaps of earth
and clay thrown up; buildings that were
undermined and shaking,
propped by great beams of wood.

Here, a chaos of carts, overthrown and jumbled together,
lay topsy- turvy at the bottom of a steep unnatural hill;
there, confused treasures of iron soaked and rusted
in something that had accidentally become a pond.

Everywhere were bridges that led nowhere;
thoroughfares that were wholly impassable;

Babel towers of chimneys, wanting half their height;
temporary wooden houses and enclosures, in the most unlikely
situations; carcases of ragged tenements, and fragments
of unfinished walls and arches, and piles of scaffolding,
and wildernesses of bricks, and giant forms
of cranes, and tripods straddling above nothing.

There were a hundred thousand shapes and substances
of incompleteness, wildly mingled out of their places, upside down,
burrowing in the earth, aspiring in the air, mouldering
in the water, and unintelligible as any dream.

Hot springs and fiery eruptions, the usual attendants upon
earthquakes, lent their contributions of confusion to the scene.

Boiling water hissed and heaved within dilapidated walls;
whence, also, the glare and roar of flames came issuing forth;
and mounds of ashes blocked up rights of way,
and wholly changed the law and custom of the neighbourhood."

(Charles Dickens, Dombey & Son)

Thus, clinging
fast to that slight
spar within
her arms,

the mother drifted
out upon the dark
and unknown sea

that rolls
round all
the world.

(Dickens, Dombey & Son)

“Man is an inveterate and incorrigible meddler, never content to leave anything as he finds it, always seeking to alter and – as he sees it – to improve.” -- Christopher Lever

"...it is true continents are partly made by 'trickling increment'; but what is on the whole truest and most strikes us about them and mountains it that they are made what now we see them by trickling decrements, by detrition, weathering and the like...And at any rate naturally said to be hewn, and to shape, itself, means in old English to hew and the Hebrew bara/ to create, even properly means to hew.  But life and living things are not naturally said to be hewn: they grow, and their growth is by trickling increment" -- Gerard M. Hopkins

lip glosses
ingenuousness

nothing incises
the surface here

unbeleaguered
velleities

there's no light, even
spin or leaven

active ingredient
augmentation, an un-

postulated precursor

caulk/chalk :
gabled/garbled :

Allophonics

poor, obscure, plain,
little---"bare ruind"---

refusing abundance
and reams---

not demure/diffident
but reticent

elliptical partial
curious impermanent
asymmetrical

astringent? no---
fascind.

A pitched drone
that alloy-plated

bark
laps against

leather-brown
tongues

Their tidings
hold fast

*
To what
does it
all boil
down?

*
To go
it alone

there-
after

I'm afraid
we're all out

of sorts / we
left no stone

untuned

*
Informed I may
have to leave

my relations

are ill
at ease the current's

infirm
at pains

to make / itself clear