I am in a van, driving through and over the Scottish Highlands.
Away from you.

Well maybe not, if the person you are, you reading, are not Tom.
Then if you are not, then you were probably somewhere else.
Unless obviously, you are Scottish, in which case, it's a very nice place. Like a girl you tell she has nice eyes, like that.

The sky is this grey-dark cloud mass, dotted with absence through which there is a blue-dark sky.

I feel empty looking at it.

Its right early, five or something, there's just a hint, maybe more of a sense that the sun is coming.

The van seats seventeen, be we're only nine. The van is noisy and I sit by the left door, the slidy one. The window in the slidy one leaks chilled highland air down my left side.

The grey-green vastness of the hills seem to have conquered a bit of the sky's gloom, the hue is slightly more pungent than the blue-grey dome we're traveling under.

You're still working.

The hills make me think of hills.

I come up with this idea that topography and poetry are the same thing. The typographer lounges around in his hat and with his telescope, mapping the lands. And I notice that a poet lounges around with his self disgust and a pencil, mapping the emotional landscape, finding the natural heights of words.

You're on a ladder. Its noted. A hill. You see.

The van is noisy. My mind is noisy with thoughts of the hills. And no, they are not alive. They're fucking hills. They are outrageous. They have more personality than half the country. Green and grey distant patches warping into valleys and heights.

Promise. I think of the Scottish farmer here 100 years ago, 400 years ago--

You still reading Tom? I wait. Good. I smile at you.

It's odd having a conversation with a future you. A you, when, I'm done. When this is done. Where were the hills done? When was the grey done? When the sun stopped.

Maybe? Just a suggestion to my own question.

Typography and poetry. Hills. You and me.