Scum Sometimes on lazy summer afternoons I meditate on all those living things that dwell on surfaces, conceal the deep, that breed and colonise, a spreading ring, aimlessly making swamps of their lagoons, blooming where other life is starved to sleep — they labour turning sunlight into food, they neither plan nor calculate nor think, they striate like the veins upon the moon, they live not learned, but native aptitude. They stink.
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