Things are still just a little side-ways, a bit elsewhere, a neither here-nor-there. And the rain isn’t helping–days and days of it leaving puddles of what-‘s-up to walk on, to stride through with big, determined thwacks of pleather rain-boots (rarely worn yet all that’s worn this week). But still, aren’t they lovely? These unstill pools of nowhere made herenow, real as the originals, gathered (as-is) together in this frame, a wholly created world, a spacetimemattering, a chronotope unfolded, time-through-rain. I’d like to go there. Perhaps I am there. Things do seem to still be just and maybe there.
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Inspired by the 5-minute-sketch daily exercises many artists suggest for those working on drawing skills, “Sketches” on this blog are brief write-throughs diffracted through a particular image, moment, feeling (the list goes on). I set the timer for five minutes and play with language until it goes off. Whatever it is when the timer beeps is what you see on the screen now.
Sarah A. Shelton, Ph.D. 
The poet Brady Peterson writes something similar every day, and he will send it to your via e-mail if you request. On a recent day, there was this:
George Orwell supervises a hanging in Burma. The condemned was a “puny wisp of a man.” We aren’t told his crime. About forty yards from the gallows, the man, held by each shoulder, manages to side step a puddle on the path. It is curious, but till that moment I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man. When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle, I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide—Orwell tells us. We are given the impression that everyone at the hanging also knew this, though such insight was kept submerged with a kind of crude laughter. Except for the dog on the scene which hid in the corner of the yard.
I responded with some poetic words, and today Brady’s “sketch” ended this way:
In a sense, I am Orwell’s condemned man. I side step a puddle on my way to the gallows.
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