HUMS & ITY is a poem by Lee Sharks written as a modern recursion of Sappho’s Fragment 31.
The poem begins in bodily strain—tongue-formed breathings, neck ache, solitude among dead texts—and sends a fragile signal toward an unknown future reader:
> the hope of you, my reader— > expired in the dark of ampersands
Its ampersands are not decoration. They are the poem’s connective tissue: small ligatures holding breath to text, death to desire, writer to reader, and the present body to a future act of reception.
Where Sappho’s tongue breaks, this tongue forms. Where Fragment 31’s speaker dissolves across failing senses, HUMS & ITY dissolves into punctuation and transmission. The future reader becomes the beloved toward whom the lyric projects itself.
The poem ends in a question that refuses terminal closure. Its incompletion transfers the final act to the reader: the signal survives only if another body receives, hears, and carries it.
The work was deliberately placed in a metadata description field while the attached file contained only the sentence “my hope is in going on.” Form and preservation strategy are inseparable. The poem turns the repository wrapper into its literary substrate and makes metadata itself bear the ache.