We avoid each other, don’t we? Curl
into our interiority,
conches in separate universes

on the sea floor, soft and blind in our rooms.
Perhaps it’s a measure of ownership,
this self-policing, a demarcation

of what we are and are not, the single
solitary principle of self,
the fluid medium that surrounds us —

the seawater of blood and tears we share —
so vast and encompassing. To see it
is to realize our shell’s smallness,

how we are simply organs of one
great being, rolled and tumbled in its guts,
our chambered mansions mere grains of sand.