pablo raze we meet outside the strip mall that served as a second home for a woodworker who looked like the sixteenth president of the united states gone to seed. the baker who brought him soup remembers trying to draw him out, though the man understood no english. he was sullen and silent and unwilling to walk away from the only life he'd ever known. even after his business failed. even as hypothermia set in and his tongue turned to ice and the frost from his lungs burned a hole through his lesser hand. no one could explain the wet weight of his clothes when he died in all that cold. a woman folding shirts tells us she was just a child when they found him. you improvise a poem for the green parakeet perched on your shoulder. you give him the spanish name for something small enough to be easily lost and say, "the people around you are sad, so you decide not to speak." you know the bird won't whisper a word of what he's heard to anyone. he habours secrets like static, like silk. 260810 what's it to you? who go blather from