Up all night thinking of a large expanse of land a young man has recently inherited. The whole area covered in orange trees, and in each orange, a short message from his father. The messages seem meaningless, scrambled, the last gesture of a lost man, but only because he’s eating them in the wrong order.

Up all night thinking of several women, sleeping together in a hot, tropical room. Empty coffee cans, a copy of John Donne’s collected poems, a single bee. A glass of water. A man.

Up all night thinking of sleeping with you in the shade of a certain almond tree my mother once told me about, via a rambling winter email. Why don’t you take her to this almond tree, didn’t she say she likes almonds. In fact, I had been planning to do just that, but on receiving this email, I changed my plans, donating a large sum of money to a local NGO which works to reduce the number of almond and other nut trees in the region, because of the threat they pose to local bunnies.

Up all night thinking of L, of her theory of insomnia; she could only get to sleep by systematically forgetting everything she’d ever loved, and she could only wake up by remembering it all again — a requirement which, she said, she was finding it increasingly difficult to fulfil.

Up all night thinking of G and A, the deep and loving bond they had, which always seemed to me to be a bit too ‘facial’ in nature. I never told them this, firstly, for fear of offending them, and secondly, because, if it were true, deepening their awareness of it could only weaken their bond. In other words, their bond was not only ‘too facial,’ but also ‘void of understanding.’

Up all night thinking of spanners, screwdrives, sundry woodworking implements I remember lying around the house. My father left them littered around but never touched any of them, as if on some level he’d wanted me to become a poet.

Up all night thinking of Kafka.

Arctic honey (feat. Kafka, Stalin, the Bible)