Streams

Life, streaming on, streaming past, but underneath it the dried out river bed of personality. 

Life, milky warm seeming to draw away as it rushes past, as if contained by a thick meniscus, pulling sightly back from the earth like a faint sneer.  Underneath it the dragon scale, the flaw that you fear everyone can see, that you fear defines you.  A reptilian aridity that repels the liquid flow.

Life, surging in a headlong rush engulfs and swamps, the flood rises and takes over, you are swirled and submerged and changed; you were too near to the bank and are now a thing with no volition, reacting only until beached once more you have time to think and reflect.  And retreat.